The brown spots are usually dead, but can sometimes surprise you by resprouting from their roots. Yellow, red, and whatnot are generally just shocked. Spreading grasses will fill the holes if your grass spreads. Realizing the vagrancies of cats, it can be hard to water the spots where they pee. If possible, though, diluting the places the cat goes will fix the problem if you get there fast enough.

I know this question is kinda old but -- are you really sure it is the dog and not the plant(s)?? There are some plants (and I'm sorry I don't recall which ones at the moment) that really don't have a pleasant odor. I'd say the odor was more akin to cat pee than dog but regardless. My dog pees in the yard all the time and I've never smelled anything from that/those event(s). Also kind of unusual for dogs to pee in the same place all the time. Now marking is another thing but that also doesn't usually have any strong odor that I've ever noticed. Just my rather late thots FWIW.

joann, thanks for the link. Our old dog has been allowed to go in the same area of the yard for a year now. It's an eyesore, but we let it go so long, that I was pretty sure nothing would ever grow there unless we dug down and removed the top layer of soil, at least. That was good information.

Guess I left a lot out. Mowing height. There is never any reason to mow St Aug lower than the mower's highest position. I experimented with letting St Aug go unmowed for years at a time. Yes it was an experiment and not lazy. It grows up to 32 inches and then stops growing. As I mowed it down I think I liked it best when mowed between 9 and 12 inches. Insect pest control. When you have been organic for awhile, you will find very few pest problems. Why? Because when you are not poisoning the insects the predators seem to come to your property to feed. You'll see birds, toads, lizards, insect predators, and some other critters keeping Nature in balance. Sometimes things happen, though. Grubs are the offspring of the beetles that usually swarm your porch lights in late spring. If you did not have enough to cover your lights, then you likely won't have any issues. But if you're still afraid, dig up a square foot of turf and look for them. If you don't see more than a dozen, you're fine. If you see uncountable numbers, perhaps your barfing all over them will fix that one spot. But what about the rest of the lawn? I would use an organic critter called beneficial nematodes. These are not the root knot nematodes that plague the south. These guys introduce a disease to the insects that essentially paralyzes them right away. I get the Guardian Lawn Patrol brand from a company out of Colorado. Make sure the yard is saturated with moisture before you apply. Nematodes need a film of water to move around and find the insects. Those will take care of fleas, too, but not ticks. Ticks can be attacked in January with the beneficial nematodes. The BN only work in the soil. In the spring ticks emerge from the soil so the BN don't catch them. Are chickens an option??? As for fire ants, as of yesterday I have a new approach. Fire ants are not sugar ants. In fact they will not survive an attack of too much sugar. So up until recently I have used molasses, about 3-4 ounces in 5 gallons of water, and drenched the mound. That worked to move the ants somewhere else. This week I added a little booster to the mix. I put in a packet of bread yeast and let that yeast grow in the water for about 20 minutes. Then I drenched the mound. I'll need to check again next week, but that ant hill is gone with no new life that I could see in the vicinity. Many ants are farmers. They bring very specific materials to their ant hill homes and deposit that stuff in their chambers. Then very specific mold and bacteria grow on the feed they brought in. The ants do not eat the food material directly but they eat off that mold and/or bacteria. When you disrupt their farming operation by introducing foreign substances, that contaminates their crop and they starve. Sugar is one of those substances with fire ants. My guess was that yeast would further contaminate their crops. I hope I'm right, because it is a very organic approach. And yes, applying a chemical insecticide will damage the microbes in the soil. One class of microbes are called microarthropods (which is probably Latin for tiny insects). If you use insecticide it takes out a lot of that class along with all the beneficial things they do for the soil. They will rebuild their population, but it is just as easy to use some other means to deal with pests. I've been organic in San Antonio since 2002 and have not seen one insect issue in that time. Even the roaches seem to have gone away.