You are at least 3 months late in asking for help. Whenever you seeded bermuda was far too early...because NOW is the time to put out bermuda seed. The soil has to be hot to get good bermuda germination. If you seeded in March or April you jumped the gun by that many months. Rototilling should be avoided at all costs for any lawn, but especially for a bermuda lawn. Why? For the very issue you are seeing now with your feet sinking in. This fluffy soil will continue to settle for the next 3 years. All you can do now is try to rearrange the high spots to fill the low spots. Don't add more soil. That causes other headaches. Using a roller might help some, but the soil will continue to settle and become bumpier for years. Why is it worse for bermuda? Because bermuda becomes the most dense when mowed low to the ground. If you have holes and hills in the soil, the mower's wheels will fall into the holes and scalp the grass down to the soil in those spots. A grass that grows best when mowed high, St Augustine for example, doesn't look scalped even when you hit a hole. Mixing bermuda sod with seeded bermuda is another issue to avoid. You already seeded it. Some of that will grow and eventually cover everything. Seeing as it's finally hot enough, it should start spreading quickly. It is not too late to change to St Augustine. A few pieces of sod will spread to cover just like the bermuda does. St Augustine is less tenacious and less aggressive than bermuda, but it will stomp all over what bermuda you have and choke it out. Contrary to popular opinion, St Augustine does not take more water than bermuda. All lawns take a similar amount of water to look nice. The main difference with bermuda is that it will come back from the dead whereas St Aug can die out from total lack of water over a period of months. Fortunately the Houston area does not have that problem. Bermuda can take almost any amount of high nitrogen fertilizer as long as you water it down immediately after application. If you wait until the next day, the morning dew will have dissolved the fertilizer into a very salty brine which can burn the blades. Washing it down with a hose dilutes it to a much less salty brine and washes it down into the soil. I could write essays about the misinformation you have received on this thread. In fact I have, over the years, written such essays. Here are the basics of the Bermuda Bible. Water deeply and infrequently. Deeply means 1 inch all at one time. Living in Houston this is already taken care of. Infrequently means no more than once a week in the hottest heat of summer. Again, Houston takes care of all your watering needs. I live in Bandera, TX and have not watered my front lawn (St Augustine) yet this year. We got an inch of rain last night, so I'm good for at least a week and maybe two. Mulch mow at the mower's lowest setting at least once a week and preferably 2-3x per week. Fertilize with a high N, fast release once a month during the growing season. You can, of course, fertilize less often, but the grass will tend to thin out and become more lime green rather than dark green. I always suggest that at least one of these applications be an organic fertilizer. Organic fertilizers keep your soil healthy along with the lawn. Use herbicide in mid April and late September. If you changed to St Augustine, the same watering method works. Mow at the highest setting no more than once a week. I try to go 2 weeks. And with St Aug you only fertilize in late May, September, and around Thanksgiving. It's a lot less hassle than bermuda.

Hello. My name is Justin and I live in North Alabama. I am a new home owner. I purchased a house 2 years ago and I have several different types of grasses from bermuda, zoysia, fescue, crabgrass and weeds.... so... below are 2 picture of the side of my yard... i was told it’s mostly zoysia mixed in with some bluegrass. my thoughts are to dethatch, aeriate and keep battling the weeds on this side and to overseed wirh zenith zoysia... now for my front yard... i want to mow low, dethatch/bag, aeriate and overseed with either zenith zoysia or handcock highlander bermuda. also looked at Oasis blend bermuda. now i have some of this in my backyard... bermuda???? can i get your thoughts and suggestions on this? i appreciate the feedback!!!

If you want a dry stream bed as a feature, that's fine, but it is not actually going to help with drainage any more than your lawn and grading is capable of doing. I'm mentioning that so you don't end up with dashed expectations after hauling in tons of gravel. Alternatively, you could just as well make a feature of landscape beds with a lot less work and expense. I suggest that part of the problem with your figuring this out is that you're drawing in tons of distracting details instead of just working out the basic shapes. They should be resolved before there is any thinking about stones, flowers and other plants. Also, you need a clean, accurate base plan to work from. It would show only the pool, pool deck, patio edge, house foot print, tree trunks and perimeter fence, drawn to scale. In order to make it easier to understand, keep everything shown in plan view. (Trees and building in the above drawing are shown in a faux perspective view.) It may be undesirable to completely cut off the lawn from the pool deck. I'm not sure of your objectives in doing this, but If it was my yard, I would not do it. Doesn't the lawn slope away from the pool deck? A fake river (dry stream) in order to not look completely contrived, will still respect some of nature's laws. If the lawn slopes down, but the stream does not follow it, it's automatically going to be placed under suspicion as a possible fraud, incapable of actually carrying water. You have to follow through with the ideas that IF water were running in the stream, it would be doing downhill, if there is a perceptible slope. Why are we leaving the stump? It does not seem like the kind of stump one would choose if they were stump shopping. I think it would be better gone and you just plant whatever garden you want in that area, without the influence/constraints of the stump. If you could sort out some of these basic issues, it would be easier to move ahead.

I agree with dchall here. Why are you putting down repeat applications of herbicide when there are no visible weeds in the lawn? Very likely you have damaged the grass putting down 3 applications of broadleaf weed killer in short succession. Read the labels. You have probably already exceeded maximum allowed rate for a full season. Lawns primarily need fertilizer and water, with some herbicides twice a year to kill weeds. Make sure to allow at least 4 weeks between applications of fertilizer and do not exceed recommended rates.