You need to get a book called "Hands-On Agronomy" by Neal Kinsey. Or you can get the DVD short version of that info, but it's not as comprehensive. They tell the how and why of getting your soil nutritionally balanced. Going blind into your soil improvement is usually a waste of money. Find out what's wrong, what's right, and how you need to tweak it with a GOOD lab test. Just adding compost or cover crops isn't going to solve the problem. If your soil nutrients aren't in balance, your pH will be wrong and you're going to have nothing but problems. Too much of one nutrient can tie up the availability of others. Some areas of the country are totally lacking necessary elements, and you'll have to add them. Both the book and the video are in the library systems. If your local library doesn't have them, request an interlibrary loan. I don't have anything to do with these people, but the book and DVD make so much sense that I'm going to get my soil tested by them. They will test it and give recommendations on how much of what you need to add or change. Sue Here is a link that might be useful: Kinsey Agricultural Services

Lots of good replies here. In a nutshell: Sand is weathered rock. Tiny little pieces of rock, broken down by wind and rain and erosion. Silt is weathered sand. These are primary minerals, broken down rock. Clay is different. Clay is a secondary mineral, created from the chemicals given off by sand and silt as they break down into smaller particles through exposure to acids like acid rain or organic acids. Clay particles are tiny plates that fit together very tightly and are attracted to each other by electrostatic charges. Time is the main difference. It takes longer for clay to form than either of the others. Sand, silt and clay are moved around by wind, water and ice. Vermont is rocky because it was scraped bare by glaciers and has not had time yet to develop new soil. Same thing where I am, in the Puget Sound area which was carved out by glaciers. Our soil is what the glaciers dumped as they melted off after carving out Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia and Hood Canal. It's like gardening in aquarium gravel. Rocks, gravel and sand. No organic matter. I wish I had clay. The river valleys have really nice loamy soil, because they get what's washing down off the mountains - organic matter from the forests, clay from weathering, volcanic ash off Mt Rainier and Mt St Helens etc, and not least, thousands of dead salmon every fall. Migrating salmon returning from the oceans, going up the rivers, spawning and dying and washing up on the banks. The best fertilizer on earth. Prairie soils develop when thick grasses trap wind blown silt and clay. A nice loamy mix of organic matter and soil. Clay soil is what it is. Best to learn to work with it, not against it. You can't change it, only replace it in small areas. Organic matter disappears because the soil microbes eat it. The sand disappears because it gets lost in the clay matrix and sets like concrete. Clay soil is much more fertile than what I have. Clay particles have a very large surface area to volume ratio, so nutrients have lots of surface area to stick to, and stick they do because clay particles are electrostatically charged. In my gravelly soil nutrients wash right through, there's no clay or organic matter for them to stick to. Sand and gravel have no electrostatic charges. All you need to do is add compost and mulch every year. If you have a good worm population they'll work it in. When I had clay I did dig in organic matter whenever planting something not native to the area, and then mulched every year. But if you add a lot of amendments to a hole in clay, you're just creating a clay pot and the plant can drown because water won't drain from the amended soil into the clay. Just add a little bit in a big hole.

Yes, many cultures certainly do make bricks by adding sand to clay. Then they do other things to it (drying and firing) to make bricks. Peat Moss isn't highly recommended either, at least for my area. It holds moisture and clay doesn't need that either. Peat moss is already pretty broken down so there is no 'activity' by the worms which is what makes the soil better. When I researched this years ago, the easiest/best thing for my situation was to compost in place. Let mother nature do the heavy lifting for you. I'd bury my kitchen scraps right in the beds. By next year that area was wonderful soil. You can re make your soil one bucket or shovel full at a time. Or try other larger scale methods. Spots where I placed the compost bin turned into wonderful soil. Places where I piled grass clippings and leaves turned wonderful soil over the next year all by themselves. I didn't have to dig, or turn the soil or work anything in. Eventually I spent one early spring season adding horse stall cleanings and composted horse manure on top of all my beds piling it right on top of my mulch. It worked wonders for the established plants and the soil.

Since you just signed on with Brock, I would give them 2 months to make it look spectacular. If they cannot do it in 2 months, they are not going to do it in 6 months or a year. Your watering approach is perfect as far as you said. The idea is to not water unless the grass needs it. Then water heavily. In FL there are going to be entire years when you don't have to water. Heck, I've had entire years when I only watered a handful of times (2014, 2017, and 2018, for examples). Centipede should grow with 99% neglect. It is jokingly said that you can drag an empty bag of fertilizer over it once every 2 years and you're fine. Hiring someone to fertilize it regularly is, er, a waste of money. The Milorganite should last all season. As for the hard soil, please try this. Use a hose end sprayer, and put 24 ounces of any clear shampoo (based on 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet - 3x8=24). Fill the rest of the spray bottle with water and stir that around trying to not make bubbles. Then spray that as evenly as you can at any dial setting until you run out. Don't worry about getting too much in places. People have tried to overdose with shampoo and they cannot. After the shampoo follow that up with 1/2 to 1 inch of rain...or irrigation. I use generic baby shampoo from Walmart, but some others prefer the fragrance of the apple shampoo at Dollar Tree. This works. In fact golf courses use surfactants similar to shampoo to do the very same thing. Here is my theory about why shampoo works. Shampoo is a surfactant which allows water to penetrate into places it normally would not go. Water will penetrate into the soil and will go down deeper into the soil than it is currently going. The temperature of the deeper soil is lower than surface soil, so the water will help cool things off. The cooler and moister environment is perfect for the soils beneficial fungi to repopulate the soil. These fungi are similar to the bread mold fungi which send out runners called hyphae everywhere. Once the hyphae are established in the soil, they absorb moisture and swell to push the soil particles apart. When the hyphae dry out, they shrink allowing gaps in the soil where air and future moisture can penetrate. This process takes about 3 weeks. After the 3 weeks is up, when it rains you should be able to walk on the grass and notice the soil is so soft it is almost unstable to walk on. Then a few days after the rain, the soil will firm up again. Picture a wet sponge drying out. The soil acts exactly like that. The surface should be soft when moist and firm/hard when dry. But be careful about mistaking a hard surface for dry soil. It is still moist underneath, especially in the FL humidity. If the grass is not wilting, it does not need more water. The roots are getting water from those new, deep zones you opened up with the shampoo. The shampoo approach works a million times better than core aerating, and it only costs you a dollar for the shampoo. ...versus $75 - $250 for the contractor to aerate. If you like the new softness of the soil and want more, use the shampoo again. I shampooed my lawn in San Antonio once in 2012 and it remained soft to walk on until we moved in 2015.