Sod is wonderful. The main disadvantage to seeding is that the seed must be kept moist while it's germinating, which means briefly watering several times a day for a couple of weeks or more. With sod, you don't have to worry about the race between new grass and weeds, as the grass is already established. Sod is more expensive than seed but if you have a small yard, it would be the less stressful way to go. You'd have an instant lawn. You would need to stay off a newly seeded lawn for weeks. Your choices of cultivars will be more limited in sod. When selecting the cultivar, make sure it's brown patch resistant. Tall fescue is generally suspectible to brown patch in hot, humid weather and Virginia has plenty of that. After grass is established, always water in the morning, not the afternoon or evening, so grass can dry off before night. When you water, do an inch at a time (measure using a tuna fish can in the yard) and let the ground dry out between waterings. Deep infrequent watering is the way to go after grass is established. You could get some Kentucky bluegrass in with the mixture of fescue; the advantage is that bluegrass spreads and fills in whereas with all fescue you generally need to overseed each fall to fill in problem spots. It's good to get a mix of cultivars so that if disease gets one kind, the others may not be affected. Fine fescues are recommended for shady lawns. I think you should have enough sun for tall fescue and KBG. Here are the VA Tech recommendations: http://pubs.ext.vt.edu/CSES/CSES-17/CSES-17.html

I ahve a realtively small front lawn - 1000 sq ft. It is patch and weedy and construction trucks from next door chewed up the front. Anyone havea good link to the steps I should take or a book? I thought I remember there is a till/not till dispute. I am thinking of going sod. Thanks very much

I can practically guarantee you that your soil is not clay. It may act like clay, but unless you have a clay brick factory in your neighborhood, it is not clay. I want to discourage you from rototilling with all my heart and soul. All it does is fluff the soil and leave an uneven subsurface where the tiller bucks up over a root and digs in where it's soft. After you level the top, that leaves the uneven subsurface for the fluffy soil to settle down against. When all the settling is finished, you will have an uneven surface which leaves your lawnmower scalping as it rolls into the low spots and holes. If your soil surface is uneven now, then you should level it. Search this forum for topics about leveling. If you know the basics of soil then you know about soil structure and the billions of microbes living in the soil. And you know that there are entire species of microbes which cannot survive unless they have air contact and other species which cannot survive IF they have air contact. And that the microbes generally live off of the sugars provided by roots and off the protein provided by dead animals (other microbes, insects, or protinacious plant matter). And you would know that the beneficial fungi in the soil can send miles and miles of microscopic hyphal structures out into the soil to separate "clay" particles and allow air and moisture to penetrate deeply and give that soft feeling when the soil is moist. And you know that you can provide food to those microbes by applying something like alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow), corn meal, soybean meal, cottonseed meal, wheat flour, etc. to the soil at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet and letting the microbes decompose it. And that by spraying the soil with something as simple as shampoo at a rate of 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet and repeating in 2 weeks you can soften the soil so it no longer has that clay-like look and feel. Well, maybe that went beyond the basics of soil care, but those sort of cover the basics of things you need to know to take it from here. I have been using organic fertilizer (described above) since 2002. When you stop using chemical fertilizers, other issues seem to clear up. I have also stopped using compost because it's expensive, it doesn't seem to help, and it is a royal PITA to apply. I consider what I do to be a 'no hassle' approach to lawn care. It doesn't matter if I over apply organics (I cant) or if the rain comes and washes stuff away (it won't) or if I used it last week and want to use it again this week. You can't make a mistake unless you apply so much that you smother the grass (that's about 80 pounds per 1,000, by the way). The rye grass prolongs the regrowth of bermuda in the spring. You should have a healthy stand of bermuda by the end of April but with the rye, it will shade the bermuda allowing all sorts of problems to happen. So here's the advice part Find the Bermuda Bible online and memorize it Forget about rototilling - concentrate on leveling. Level it next June or July when the bermuda has recovered from the damage caused by the rye. Spray the soil with shampoo to soften it. It should be a clear shampoo like baby shampoo. Apply alfalfa pellets to feed the microbes. The microbes will feed your plants.

You cannot blame your neighbor for your crabgrass. Crabgrass seed is everywhere, but it only germinates when the environment is right. It was your management that allowed the crabgrass to get started. Every now and then we will get a note here thanking us for the watering and mowing advice which put a dead stop to the neighbor's encroaching crabgrass. If you are doing it right, crabgrass will grow right up to the edge of your lawn and stop. It will stop because your soil is too dry for seed to germinate and because your grass is too dense for the crabgrass to get any light. First of all you need a dense canopy of grass. If you have fescue turf, you should overseed every fall until it is as dense as necessary to keep the crabgrass out. If the Pennington bag has Kentucky bluegrass in it, then the turf can become dense without annual overseeding. Secondly, only seed northern grasses in the fall. Why? Because crabgrass seed only germinates in the spring. If you seed grass in the spring, you will germinate all the crabgrass seed in the process. Also if you seed grass in the spring the summer heat will kill it. Third, do not mow at your mower's lowest setting. If your grass is dense you can mow at the 3-inch level. If it is less dense, then you might raise it up to the mower's highest setting until the grass becomes more dense. That might take years of overseeding if you have only fescue and no Kentucky bluegrass. Fourth, don't fertilize in the early spring. Wait until after the fast flush of spring growth is over. Memorial Day is a good day to shoot for. Once your lawn is established, the watering mantra is deep and infrequent. Deep means one inch all at one time. Infrequent means monthly watering in the cool months and gradually increasing the frequency to weekly in the hottest heat of summer. By allowing the soil surface to dry out completely between watering, the weed seeds cannot germinate. They need to have continual watering to do that. You might have neighbors who water daily for a few minutes. That is exactly wrong for too many reasons to go in to. After you have a few months of deep and infrequent going on, then you can adjust the amount you put down for your situation. Variables include shade, sun, clouds, wind, humidity, soil type and condition, grass type, mowing height, and probably some that don't come to mind right now. You need to measure the output of your sprinklers using a cat food or tuna can. Time how long it takes to fill a few of those cans placed around the yard. My system takes 8 full hour to fill a can but my neighbor's takes only 20 minutes. Every system is different. Another example of different is my house in San Antonio is under a dense canopy of oak trees. With my grass, mowing height, and soil, I can normally water for 3 hours per week in the summer (3/8 inch) but sometimes I have to go to 5 hours. During our driest years I will have to water for 7 hours per week to keep the grass from wilting before the week is up.