I am actually glad this thread got revived. I didn't read all of it but it got me thinking. I am in NC and have clay soil and Bermuda. I had my back yard sodded a few years ago (pretty sure it's tifway 419) and right now it looks pretty good for it to be mid May. My front yard was sodded by the builder (don't know if it's common Bermuda or tifway) and just hasn't greened up like the back. The ground is definitely hard. I am following the Bermuda bible but am looking to going to a more hybrid program of synthetics and organics. I currently do use milorganite more so for the iron then anything. Anyways, my plan was to aerate next month and immediately follow it up with 10 lbs of alfalfa per 1000 sq. ft. That way I could get it deep in the soil and let the microbes do their thing. I was going to follow it up 3 weeks later with 20 lbs of alfalfa. Now that I'm reading this I'm not sure what to do. Any advice? If I do the shampoo is there any restrictions on applying fertilizer or herbicides to my yard before or after? My back yard looks good but I have this God awful broadleef weed that is spreading. I sprayed it at the beginning of the month with good results and will need to spray again at the end of the month. I also plan on fertilizing in a couple of days. Thanks in advance for the help.

Fall is the ideal time to re-seed/overseed, but in my opinion they should have overseeded in early spring. The #1 way to prevent weeds is to have thick, healthy turf grass, mowed at 3.5-4 inches. A healthy lawn will block the crabgrass from getting any sun and ultimately smother it. Granted, you still would have had plenty of weeds this summer, it's not like your first overseed in the spring would have magically created a lush lawn, but it would have given you a foundation, so that this fall you could really overseed and by next spring have a thick, healthy lawn. It seems like a waste to put grub control, fertilizer, and per-emergent on sparse lawn. Really, they were just fertilizing the weeds. Timing is very critical on the pre-emergent, especially so with organic corn meal gluten. You need to put it down when the forsythia starts to bloom or the first 3 consecutive 50+ degree days. If they missed that window, it's effectiveness is compromised. Depends when in April they put it down. Should have been down the first week, the latest. If you have that many weeds it would be best to start over completely. You need to really kill all those weed seeds and the only way to do that is to either use roundup all over the lawn or preferable without using chemicals by using a process called Solarization (see link below). You could get started doing all of this right away and be ready by late august for core aeration, overseeding, and most likley lime application, but I would HIGHLY recommend having a soil test done. UConn may have an extension office, I know Umass does and it is cheap and provides PH and all the other key nutrient levels of your lawn. Good Luck Shawn Here is a link that might be useful: Lawn Solarization

>>Morph can you expand on the idea of "juicy, weak growth" in the spring? Most people would be surprised by this because everybody is told to fertilize in the spring. Tell me about it. This is probably the one concept we get the most resistance on. And I cringe every year when the Scott's "Feed your lawn! Feed it!" ads are on in March. This is for northern grasses like we have. Southern grasses like Bermuda have very different feeding patterns. Your lawn stores carbohydrates in its root system for winter survival. By spring, amounts of these are down, but there are still plenty to fuel growth through May. Grass growth in April and early May is always very, very strong as the grass is attempting to grow to its genetic height (usually anywhere from 18" to 36" depending on the cultivar). It's using the remaining carbohydrate storage to fuel that. Adding nitrogen at this stage just accelerates the growth, and speeds up how fast the stored carbohydrates tap (nitrogen is not common in nature and plants are geared to absorb everything they can get and use it). As the roots tap, they die off and slough. For feeder roots, that's not a major issue as this will happen anyway. For larger roots, it's a problem as it reduces their ability to tap water from the soil. Genetically speaking, grasses don't care about summer performance. By then, they've seeded out and the seeds just need to develop and age a bit, then fall to the ground and get ready to sprout when the weather shifts in fall. So in nature, tapping the root systems and looking terrible in July isn't a problem (and why some grasses have dormancy mechanisms to survive the [dry] summer). We don't like that tendency, so avoiding excess N in spring will help with this. Faster growth on anything tends to be weaker, more watery, and less well-defended. Overfeed any plant with nitrogen and you'll see that as the internode lengths increase drastically, and the stems become easy to bend and a bit weak. You've now created a weakened grass with a ton of available mass. Herbivorous insects now move in to eat it (it's there, there's a lot of it, it's an invitation). Breaks in the structure also allow disease to move in and set up light housekeeping--disease fungi love that. Holding off feeding until May when growth slows puts the nitrogen to a different use. Instead of fueling growth, the grass is shifting to summer mode where it stores energy to survive the dry and hot periods. Rather than decrease summer performance, you're increasing it a little. Summer is a "hang on and survive" period for grasses, so sparking growth by feeding isn't a good idea here either. Similarly, fall doesn't light off nearly the growth surge that spring does, so feeding tends to go to carbohydrate storage, root growth, and general health. That last fall feeding when the grass is no longer growing is actually the most important--the very vast majority of it will go directly to carbohydrate storage (the rest goes to root growth, which continues right up to ground freeze). That's providing energy to survive the winter, and to support normal growth rates in spring. These rules are for synthetics...nature provides very few fast nitrogen sources to plants (urea and blood being the only two I can think of offhand). Most natural sources are slow to very slow, and don't cause these issues. Organic feeding simulates a more natural feeding regimen, while still holding feeding levels high (as they have to be for our not very natural lawns). We stress the heck out of these things by mowing them constantly, planting densely, and demanding a weed-free environment.

After overseeding, you want to wait as long as possible to mow. If you must, you must. Berfore overseeding, try to cut the lawn down to an inch and a half and bag the clipping--or get it down to what you can in what time you have to mow. The more you lay off your lawn after overseeding, the better it is for your seedlings. After a few weeks, they may be strong enough to take the trampling.