You also get the wisdom of the ages and people who might not have the same experiences. The advice I gave is based on years (and years) of reading and moderating forums for amateurs and professionals. Applying fertilizer on Memorial Day might be too late in your area due to the onset of summer heat, but as a starting point, it is a very easy date to remember. Whether you get disease or not depends also on grass variety, air circulation, dew, humidity, soil type, and other factors. I'm not sure why Georgia would be much different from other places where the taller grasses are the healthier ones. At the same time that the wisdom of the ages sounds like a good idea, you also get the senility of the aged. Tupersan is relatively new to my repertoire of garden products. I became 100% organic before I heard of it and seem to have a block about that product. In general I don't put any faith in preemergent herbicides but people I respect tell me they work. I do recall from my relatively recent reading that Tupersan works as tiemco says. Professional grass growers (livestock producers) fertilize with 1/4 of their annual nitrogen in the spring, and they always apply it after the initial flush of green growth has ended. They apply 3/4 of the annual nitrogen in the fall. They do it this way to minimize their mowing workload and to spread the productive growth along throughout the entire growing season. The wisdom of the ages here at GardenWeb also agrees with tiemco that combination fertilizer/weed killer products are not going to do what you expect them to do and it is better to use different products for the different requirements. Yes Mother Nature has Her own ideas about watering, but for what you do, you do not have to encourage weeds. Far too many people set their sprinkler to operate for 10 minutes every day. That schedule is going to germinate every seed in the garden. You have control over your own watering. Allowing the soil surface to dry out as much as you can will develop deep, drought resistant roots as well as minimize weed seed germination.

This was a reseed of an existing lawn. My rain gauge shows I recieved a whopping 18 inches of rain from Friday to Tuesday. Unfortunately, the heavy rain washed out the root ball of my neighbors oak tree which came crashing down on my house. I had to go out there and saw it up, in the mush, and I had to walk all over the yard heavily. In some places I sink ankle deep into mud. What a mess. There was so much rain I am pretty sure more than half the seed washed away if not all of it. I bought another 50Lb bag of seed and will wait a few days to see what sprouts before applying more. I am sure I will have clumps and bare spots. I did wheat straw about aa third of the lawn when i applied seed last week. I do not know if I should throw seed right on top of it and apply more wheat straw or just rake up the existing wheat straw and start over. Another issue is the aeration I did last week was for naught. All the holes were completely filled in due to the heavy rain. Not sure if I should re-aerate or not. What suggestions does anyone have on re-aerating and reseeding on top of wheat straw? Oh yeah, this time I bought a different brand of fescue seed instead of the Lesco transition I normally use. I will post the brand, the fescue varieties it contains, and the quality of the grass in the near future. I think it is called Gold Standard and supposedly it is formulated for the SE region but I am not at home right now to check the bag. Thx.

>How big of an area are you talking about?Rather small, actually. It's a small strip alongside the driveway, measuring something like 5' x 10'. >I'm going to go back to TW's first post and suggest that your friend should learn to love Bermuda.I suppose he could learn to love dandelions, oxalis and crabgrass as well, but that's really not an ideal suggestion for my fescue lawn or garden beds growing alongside it. I can't understand anyone who *chooses* to grow Bermuda grass. It's invasive to every other part of your landscape, ugly (compared to fescue anyway) and turns a lovely shade of brownish gray in the winter. :( Solarization sounds like the most effective choice, but lord, having a dead lawn next door for the next year hardly has me dancing for joy. But I appreciate the suggestions.

That really depends on how much you plan on doing to develop the lawn. Much depends if you want to use synthetic fertilizers (i.e. Scotts, etc.) or go organic with Milorganite (some don't consider this "totally" organic), Soybean Meal, Alfalfa pellets, etc. With Organics, it's more expensive but your developing the the organic matter in the soil, versus synthetic where your feeding the grass. Before I went organic, I used UT's facility in Nashville http://soilplantandpest.utk.edu/ You can actually mail your soil sample to them. They will come back with a basic plan on what, and how much, stuff to apply. The forms tell you what to do on this site. You could also ask your local county extension https://utextension.tennessee.edu/knox/Pages/default.aspx They could also give guideance on where to get a soil test and may handle it for you. If you are thinking of going Organic and work on building the soil food web, google organic lawn fertilizing and you will find a host of Info on it. When I started going organic, I had a test done by Logan Labs in Ohio ($20 for the basic) and posted it on another site which has some great guys giving advice (my lawn has never looked better). Not sure if I am allowed to post that site here, so I'll defer that for now. Start there and let us know how you make out