I just searched this forum for "seeding bermuda" and got 16 pages of posts. Assuming you did the same search I'm surprised you couldn't find anything. Never rototill in prep for a lawn. If you read that spring is a bad time to seed, did you notice whether they were talking about northern grasses or bermuda? There are a lot of subtleties in the replies to the messages in gardening forums. Bermuda is always seeded in the summer. If you seed it now, you will watch and wonder until May or so. Why do you think the back was seeded and not sod? What happened that the back did not do well? Do you have any shade in the back? Too much shade is about the only reason bermuda will not thrive. Can you post a picture of the back? Find the Bermuda Bible online and memorize it.

That is too bad. We warn and warn and warn against spring seeding but you know who gets all the attention? The magazines and TV that put on a full court press to get your seeding done in the spring. What kills me is the availability of bermuda grass seed in March in my area. Bermuda is a HOT season grass and seed will not sprout for months after it goes on sale. Now that it is hot as blazes here, they have put the fescue blends on the shelf. In San Antonio??? Puh LEEZE! Yes you only thought you had done all your research. It always pains me to find out I overlooked something really basic that everyone else seems to know. Like, How did I miss THAT? Grass1950 got it right with the one step forward and two steps back. It is heartening to see you have a positive attitude toward a second reno in the same year. I would say your lawn as is has a shot at recovery but it will not be until this time next year that you see the results. If you reno again in August, you can have it looking pretty good by October. KBG is one of those ground covers with the following characteristics: The first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps. Have patience and you will be rewarded. 1. Find the seed you want. Check the NTEP trials for your state and area to see what they like. Lean toward those but don't necessarily commit yet. Look at previous years trials for other varieties. Some are more readily available and perhaps the newer ones offer only marginal improvements. With seed you usually get what you pay for. You should pay more for seed with 0.00% Weed Seed and 0.00% Other Crop. There are a few pesky grasses with seeds the size of dust that can create the wrong lawn if you get them in your seed. Look online for seed suppliers and ask here about actual human's experiences with the vendor. Please don't look at anything that has rye seed in it. The reason takes a lot of words but suffice it to say it sprouts quickly and gives you false hopes as to your new seed. 2. If all you have is annual weeds, then don't respray the RoundUp. Just rent the power rake and set the blades to shred right at ground level. Some places the blades will not hit the ground. Don't panic. Shred the existing weeds and grass and blow or rake it all up. Then reevaluate your surface. You will still have some low spots and high spots. Use your judgement to lower the blades another 1/4 inch to dig up and shred the rest of the plants in the low spots. With this run you will also shred the surface of the high spots loosening the soil. Try to remember where the high spots were and hit them a little harder to loosen more soil. Then use a carpet or something big and relatively heavy to drag around and move the loose soil into the holes. The carpet will have enough horizontal structure to not fall into the holes itself and remove the soil but it will pull loose soil in. Drag that carpet every which way until you are happy with the way it looks. Then water it to settle the dust. I should say that you will suffer the ill effects of rototilling for 3 more years as your soil settles. Consider this a training session for the ultimate leveling you might do in 2015 or so. The reason you had bumpy soil in the first place was because someone rototilled. It is possible to have putting green perfection even at home. Check the archives here to find more on leveling the lawn. 3. Scatter the seed. Roll the seed down with a water fillable roller (rented). The purpose is to get good contact between the seed and soil. It is the soil against the seed that keeps the seed from drying out. Covering the seed with top dressing is too random. You can have large areas that don't take because the covering was too thick. Just roll it. KBG takes a looonnnnggg 3 weeks to come in to the 80% mark. Keep the moisture on as you did before for the entire time. Don't be tempted by early sprouts to back off on watering yet. At 3 weeks you should be approaching 80% germination which is about all the seed producers guarantee. 4. Once the seed is up, you can start thinking about adjusting your mowing height (3 to 3.5 inches for KBG). You can start thinking about backing off on the frequency of watering. Normal for the fall is to apply a full inch once a month. Don't apply 1/4 inch per week or 1/30 inch per day. Apply it all in one day. The reason for that is, remember how you water for new seed (every day), that is what weed seeds are looking for. Once again I need to warn you that the annual weeds you saw in August were summer annuals. There are also winter/spring annuals that you will not see. Those plants will sprout along with your grass but will not show their heads until spring. For the most part we lovingly call those wild flowers but they are traditional weeds. They are annuals and will die in late spring. Again, don't panic. Once your grass is in in the fall I believe you can apply a preemergent herbicide (not corn gluten meal) to minimize the spring weeds. You can also fertilize with organics and even chemical ferts in the fall. Tiemco will be along with more specific help on that. 5. What you want to do in the fall is get your new seeds up and mowed a few times. This will prepare the roots for the summer heat next year. You want to get it as dense as possible for 1-year grass. That density will protect your lawn from weeds of all kinds next season. 6. Early next spring you will be tempted by all manner of advertising to apply fertilizer early. Please resist. KBG will put on enough growth in the early spring that pumping it up with fertilizer is not needed. Wait until after the early flush of new growth to apply the first app. Think in terms of Memorial Day for now. You sound like someone who is going to take this lawn pretty seriously. If so you should go ahead and get a soil test at Logan Labs in Ohio. For $20 they give a much better test than any university or county extension service. Post your test results here and you will get help as to what to add and where to find the additives.

You are short. I don't know if you're short some fertilizer, but it sure looks like you are. Did that lawn get fertilized last fall? How much? It looks to me like you tried to save thirty bucks. I don't know if you're short some sunlight, but it sure looks like you are. Do those trees shade the lawn off? One group of trees shades in the morning, and a different group of trees shades in the evening? And not much sunlight for the lawn? You can NOT grow turfgrass in the shade. Can we call in a tree service, to thin out the branches in the trees, leaving the trees looking good, and the grass growing? I don't know if you're short some water, but it sure looks like you are. Water at night if you have to. But that's some pretty parched dirt you have there, with some pretty parched lawn plants hanging onto life, by a thread. You don't need to RoundUP. Plant the grass seed. But you gotta keep the seed moist, and you gotta get some fertility onto that ground. And you gotta get some sun.

Yes, you can aerate before verticutting. That would actually help to slice up the soil plugs. The purpose of verticutting is to create shallow slits for the seed to fall into, contact the soil and retain moisture. The slits keep the seed relatively in place, unless you get a real flooding rain. So when you verticut in two directions, you initially get what looks like a grid of grass coming up, but it fills in. I go a little crazy with a verticutter and mow in two directions and then do two directions on the diagonal, but I can get obsessive when I work on a lawn. You can fertilize all at once, after it's all done. That's the fun part. Use a starter fertilizer that contains extra phosphorus for robust root development. Then in mid-November, use a regular lawn fertilizer that is high in nitrogen, a quick release form. The purpose of that last feeding is to get the plants to produce a lot of food resources (sugars) that are then moved into the roots when the plants go dormant for winter. Come springtime, the grass uses those stored foods to emerge from dormancy, thicken up and grow nice and green. There is really nothing you can do to deal with weeds until the grass becomes established, so don't worry about weeds now. Get the turf up and growing. You don't want to do anything to weeds until you have mowed at least twice, but I would wait until next spring to spray. Young grass plants can be vulnerable to lawn weed killers. Also, and this is not fun, if you get a dry winter, you need to keep watering the new grass. It will need about a half inch of moisture every two or three weeks just to stay alive. That probably won't be an issue for you, but down here in KC, I have actually had to hook up hoses and water young turf in the winter. You ask good questions. Don't apologize. And it IS worth doing well, because it's a big job and the seed, fertilizer and equipment rentals are not cheap! Here is a K-State publication on fertilizing lawns. Most if not all of this can apply to SD. Here is a link that might be useful: Fertilizing Kansas Lawns