>>You should watch your lawn and it will tell you when it needs water until eventually you can get to the correct schedule. I am still working on this transition on my lawn. It can take a while, particularly if the lawn is young. Its first summer, it's pretty thirsty. Transitioning is a little easier, but a year is still not out of bounds--and the lawn will continue to improve root depth for years. Appropriate feeding is critical for red thread, but just as bad as too little nitrogen is...too much. It'll encourage a lot of very juicy, green growth that red thread will love (although the grass may actually be able to outgrow the red thread's visible effects...for a while). Treatment with corn meal or cracked corn at 10 to 20 pounds per thousand square feet will slowly help you get ahead of the problem, but it's not a miracle cure. Application can be started any time, and repeat every 3 months during the growing season. Alternately, if chemical controls don't bother you, almost any fungicide will set the red thread back. Removing the overly-watered conditions that encouraged it should help with that to finally get rid of it. I prefer not to use these as they tend to be rather wide-spectrum and damage helpful fungi that are actually trying to help control the issue. Use one or the other--organic or chemical solutions--as the chemical will keep the organic from working by killing the trichoderma fungus you're applying with the corn.

thanks to everyone for the comments. i posted this original item partially to help some beginners to avoid some of the pitfalls of lawn care (which this website allowed me to do) and partially to get some advice from the experts (i am no expect, me and my lawn are both works in progress). i am simply trying to fine tune my annual maintenance schedule and may post it when it is finalized. as far as chemical vs organic, i do have a 13 month old so am trying to transition to a more organic approach. but for crabgrass and poa control i will likely stay with pendamethalin (halts/dimension) and keep her off the lawn for a week or so. for antifungal, i will try to stay will fine cracked corn, but if major parts of my lawn are dying i reserve the right to treat with a more potent, target specific chemical (i realize then i will lose the option of using cracked corn/corn meal for 2-3 months). in the past i have been too quick to use chemicals for dollar spot/leaf spot when only a few small areas of lawn have been impacted, less than 1ft diam. spots turning brown/melting out.

Birds (robins and bluejays mostly) come solely to my lawn in swarms pre and post grain spreading all the time. The application of grains does not appear to attract them. I find the same thing, but I am hesitant to repeat it every single time I see someone ask the question. So much is interrelated with the organic program that every reply has the potential of going 3,000 words or more. I love to talk about wasps and dung beetles but I just have to stop myself. I spread coarsed cracked corn two weeks ago. Soil temps have been ~50. The corn is mostly dissolved and working its way into the soil. It seems to melt in. It doesn't dissolve so much as it disappears. When I say it disappears I mean that it is still there but you can no longer see it. It is covered with decomposing fungi and has assumed the color of soil.

Yes, read Kimmsr's link to the Soil Food Web Primer. That was the first comprehensive explanation of how soil really works. Before that it was only speculation about the soil microbes. Until the 1990s only a dozen could be grown in the laboratories. Then DNA testing showed there were tens of thousands of microbes. Later DNA testing shows 100,000 species of microbes. The microbes we're talking about are bacteria, fungi, microarthropods (teensy insects), and protozoa. Normally in Nature, plants and animals die on the surface of the soil. The surface of the soil is filled with microbes which only decompose stuff that falls on the surface. They are specialists and do not work underground. Some of the stuff that dies on the ground washes into the soil - blood for instance. Just under the surface are other microbe species that handle this specialty. Furthermore, the upper level species do biological things analogous to peeing, pooping, sweating, shedding, spitting, etc. There are other specialist microbes which decompose the byproducts of other biological processes. There are still other specialist microbes which process the biological byproducts of the byproduct specialists. The food chain in the soil is so complicated it is referred to as the Soil Food Web. The key to starting the process going is to supply real food to the surface of the soil, not buried under the surface. Somewhere in that food web a product is produced which is plant food. It takes about 3 full weeks from the time you apply fertilizer to the surface for the plant food microbes to have produced enough. Then the grass greens up and becomes dense. Most of us do not care to slaughter animals and spread their remains over the surface of the soil, so we opt for ground up grains. Corn (sort of popular), wheat (hardly popular at all), alfalfa (very popular), soybean meal (very popular), cottonseed meal (not very popular), and any other ground up nut, bean, or seed containing protein makes a good fertilizer for the soil microbes. Even used coffee grounds make a fertilizer. You can get them in gold, 30-pound bags at Starbucks. Regarding livestock rotation: there is a different school of thought that is taking hold in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and in parts of Mexico and elsewhere around the world. Rather than two, three, or four pastures, farmers and ranchers are going with 15 to 30 different pastures. Animals are let in only after the grass has fully matured. That might mean gone fully to seed. Grass gone to seed has traditionally been thought of as inedible, but when the animals come in hungry, it disappears. Depending on how fast the rest of the pastures are growing the animals might be left in one pasture until the grass is gone. If the grass is growing fast, they will be pulled when the next pasture is ready. When you have 15 to 30 pastures to choose from, it can be complicated. The idea is to keep the animals completely off the pastures while the forage is regrowing. The rest of this program suggests you only put into the system what benefits the biology of the system. One thing that is recognized as harmful to the system is deworming medicines. Ivermec is the main name brand but there are others. Dewormers are poisonous to dung beetles. If farmers would stick to treating only the wormy animals, then it might not affect large population of dung beetles. But farmers are being told to prevent worms by treating all the animals every month - thus increasing the sales of dewormers. Once you go to routine monthly injections, all the dung beetles will die out. When you stop with the deworming, some of the animals go to the slaughter house early because they have parasites, but not all get them. Once you have culled the herd of all the parasite prone animals, you have better genetics and will continue to breed healthier animals. Also once you stop with the dewormers, the dung beetles return. One Central Texas rancher reported seeing the early morning sky black with clouds of dung beetles flying in. Another one has documented the speed with which his manure is processed by the beetles. He took pictures from the time the cow's tail went up until the manure pat was gone. He used an irrigation flag to locate the pat. The total time it took until there was nothing but a wet spot was 24 hours. And he has noticed that when his animals leave one pasture to move into another, 24 hours later there are no piles of manure to be found. Where does the manure go? If you're still reading you know the answer. It gets buried by the dung beetles. Those beetles dig a hole up to 3/4 inch across and 6 to 10 feet deep. When it rains, and even when it pours for days on end, these ranchers report they have zero erosion and no runoff. While neighboring ranches spend tens of thousands to rebuild their washed out roads, the ranches with the dung beetles don't have those costs. So they don't have the cost of the dewormer meds; don't have to buy the manure shredders and spreaders; don't have to pay to house, insure, and repair that equipment; and don't have to repair their roads from the weather. In addition they don't have to irrigate their pastures because several feet of rain can be captured in the dung beetle holes during one thunderstorm. If you had several hundred beetle holes per square yard, you could dump 4 inches per hour on that and not see runoff. How long can you sustain this approach to rotation? One rancher I talked to has been doing it for 20 years. He has the cost of his animals down to about $15 per animal because he no longer buys seed, fertilizer, medicine, herbicide, insecticide, dewormers, hormones, or supplemental feed. Even in Texas with the periodic droughts we've had, he has been increasing his stocking density until he's running about double what his neighbors are doing. Their expenses keep climbing and his keep going down. Their land keeps deteriorating and his keeps improving. The last thing he got rid of was cowboys. Rather than having a 3,000 acre ranch, he has pastures that are only 50 acres. With 300 cow/calf pairs on 50 acres, when the grass is gone, the mamas have learned to line up to move into the next pasture. There is no need for a round up because all the animals are lined up right in front of you.