Jessaka  You have read the Organic lawn care faq. You have received good advise. Let me expand on the above a little. Organic matter is all the stuff in the mineral soil that is now or was recently living. That includes all living and dead grass roots, living and dead organisms such as bacteria, fungi, micro bugs, worms, etc. The living organisms are mostly microscopic but vary in size from visible worms and bugs down to bacteria, mold and fungi. They live on the live and dead ones and plant debris thus recycling themselves, releasing nutrients that the living grass uses. Without food, as in a chemical only fed lawn, this living microheard diminishes and is not healthy. The organic matter that we add to the lawn and garden soil provides most of what the microheard needs to thrive. That includes some food, shelter, moisture and oxygen (air). Applications of compost provide both organic matter (OM) and living micro-organisms but little food. Compost is good but not the only way to get OM into the soil. Returning your grass clippings to your lawn is one valuable source. Do not throw this stuff away. It is very good for your soil and therefore your lawn. Mulch mowing as much fallen leaves as you can is a valuable resource. Shredded leaves will decompose (turn into compost) in place over winter. Like us humans, a healthy microheard needs food (protein ) to aid in eating each other and the other OM that nature or you placed there. Feed your living soil with protein feeds. That means organic fertilizer such as soy bean meal, corn meal or cracked corn, alfalfa meal or pellets, cotton seed meal and/or commercial organic fertilizers such as Milorganite, Scotts and others. For a healthy lawn, mulch mow your clippings and cut the lawn long (3 to 4 inches), cutting 1/3 or less of the blade length each time. This method of mowing will aid, not harm your lawn. Clipping are mostly water and will dry and decompose quickly. Water deeply but infrequently to train the roots to go deep to find moisture. Good luck with your organically fed lawn. Bill Hill

There is an organic lawn care forum on Gardenweb. It's been around for years. Nobody asked for it, but when iVillage took over this website, they created it. But back in the day there had been some serious fire fights over organics. I'm sure that led to the separation and the new organic lawn forum. I have never been thrilled with the organic lawn forum here. Interestingly I have been asked to be the moderator for three other lawn care forum websites. Still most of my participation recently has been here. On one of those other websites, morph became the guy who answered anyone's question about organics. I learned a lot from him, so he's a very good resource for any website, in my opinion. The organic lawn care forum here is 100% dedicated to organic solutions to lawn care issues. On that forum if you suggest using RoundUp to quickly cure a problem that might otherwise linger for years, you will incur the wrath and ridicule of the regulars. Sometimes staunch adherence to an organic solution for everything can make organics seem like it doesn't work. You have picked up on my preference for organic solutions when and where they are possible and most practical. But I am flexible enough to allow for some use of chemicals when they are expedient to the issue at hand. My preference is always for an organic solution. I stopped fertilizing with chemicals in 2002. Do I still use chemicals for other things? Seldom but it has happened. If you have a snail problem in your yard, there is nothing safer or faster than ammonium sulfate. It is a fertilizer that looks and acts like rock salt. The snails cannot move across it without killing themselves. It literally works overnight to wipe out any sized population of snails or slugs. It also acidifies the soil to an extent, fertilizes to an extent, and acts as a chemical fungicide to an extent. It also stinks up the garage until you get rid of it. You can buy a lifetime supply for under $10, so if I had snails, I'd pull that chemical in for a one-time use. I have St Augustine grass which can become thin for many reasons. When it does, there are opportunistic plants like bermuda grass and horse herb which will move in quickly. The typical broadleaf weed control, Weed-B-Gone, will also kill St Augustine. The only weed killer that works on St Aug is atrazine, a powerful and persistent, pre and post emergent weed killer and a known health risk for fetuses. I tried it a few years ago spot spraying only the spots with weeds. You're only allowed to use it once per year, but it flat wipes out everything but the St Augustine. If you apply it in April that gives you a full season to get the St Aug back to a dense turf which resists weeds. With the repeated and prolonged application of chemical fertilizers, your soil microbiology can become disrupted. Normally the soil has 100,000 or so interrelated species of bacteria, fungi, microarthropods, yeast, protozoa, and one other class I can never remember. If you apply an insecticide, you disrupt the balance of microarthropods. If you apply a fungicide, you disrupt the balance of beneficial fungi. If you apply something with antibacterial properties (alcohol, dish washing soap, bleach, etc.), then you disrupt the population of bacteria and fungi. When you disrupt an entire class of creatures from a food chain, then no good things happen. When you apply chemicals for a long time with no periodic application of organics, you can get into what we have called a see-saw effect. The grass can look great but quickly deplete the chemical ferts in the soil. Then it crashes and looks horrible even though you just applied fertilizer. If you apply a stronger dose of chemical fertilizer, sometimes it will recover and look better than before and sometimes that kills the entire lawn. If you had a healthy soil microbiology, those critters would pull up the slack and help out. But if something is wrong and the the microbes are not all well fed, then there is no cavalry coming to the rescue. For that reason, if you are on a full chemical program, for example the Bermuda Bible program, I always ask people to apply something organic at least once a year. I'm not going to insist - what would be the point of that? But I do try to explain why you might want to use one app of organics. As for the cost of organics, the cost went waaaaaay down when I wrote the Organic Lawn Care FAQ. Prior to the 1990s the only organic materials were compost and manure. Animal dung manure was the historical garden and farm fertilizer. Rodale changed that to composted manure in the 1930s. Supply and demand drove the cost of compost through the roof. Manure stunk badly and was "hot" with immediately available nitrogen. Many people killed their lawns with hot manure. And it stinks, so there's that, too. Compost is just plain expensive. And most people could not figure out the amount to apply. The amount to apply based on the NPK is about 1 cubic yard per 1,000 square feet or 700 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Most people misjudged that horribly and applied as much as 4 or 5 cubic yards (2,400 to 3,500 pounds) per 1,000 square feet. They completely smothered their lawns. They killed it with kindness. I still see lawns smothered in my neighborhood. Then in 2002 I had read Dr Elaine Ingham's article on soil biology on the USDA website. I visited my local feed store and started reading labels. I noticed that the ingredients in organic fertilizer were the same ingredients as in dry dog and cat food with very few exceptions. I checked the prices for those raw ingredients and noticed I could save about 80% off the cost of commercially bagged organic fertilizer if I bought the raw ingredients in plain brown bags. So before I even spent any money on a bag of corn meal I went home and scattered some dog food on the lawn. Three weeks later the test area was greening up and becoming more dense. After that I started buying 3-dollar bags of corn meal (50 pounds for $3 seems crazy today). It worked but not as well as I had hoped. But based on Dr Ingham's work and what I found at the feed store, and the results I got, then I wrote the Organic Lawn Care FAQ. As it turns out I was simply not using enough corn meal to make it work. I've learned that since. The Organic Lawn Care FAQ changed everything. No longer did you have to endure stinky manure. No longer did you have to spend an arm and a leg for compost. No longer were you likely to smother the lawn under those two materials. And no longer did you have to spend an arm or a leg to buy commercially bagged organic fertilizer. I posted the Organic Lawn Care FAQ on the three forums I moderated and posted it here in the Organic Gardening forum. It has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times (according to download counters). I have learned a lot since writing it so it should be revised, but it serves as a good place to get oriented and a head start with organic lawn care. Sometimes the organic solution to a problem works better than a chemical solution. Caterpillars, for example, can be stopped from feeding instantly by one drop of bacillus thuringiensis (BT for short). It is a bacterial disease that only affects caterpillars. It causes immediate lockjaw in them, and they stop feeding. After about 3 days of not moving or feeding, they are dead if they have not been picked over by the birds. But if you use a chemical solutions to caterpillars, those affect all the insects in the soil and above resulting in a recovery period which can take months. Two other organic materials, spinosad and beneficial nematodes, also introduce paralyzing diseases to insects, but those are not as targeted as BT. They work on contact, so the insect does not have to eat anything. As for fungal disease problems in lawns, corn meal is the organic solution. It works better for some than for others, but it has worked year after year for me since 2002. The major problem with disease is that it happens in the summer. When you look at the label of the chemical fungicides it tells you not to apply if the temp is going to be 90 degrees F. Well, they really mean 85 degrees F, because if you use it above 85 degrees, you will kill the grass. All grasses. But if you use corn meal, you can use that at any temperature. Corn meal is obviously an organic solution which requires a healthy population of soil microbes. As the corn meal decomposes, a predator fungus becomes attached to it. That predatory fungus will feed on the disease fungus and wipe it out. So your only choice for killing disease in the summer is corn meal. If you live in the south, it's still above 85 every day down here. The window for using chemical fungicides in the south is very small. But having said alllll that, from reading three lawn care forums for 12 years, the primary cause of lawn issues is improper watering. Second is mowing. Fertilizer and all these chemicals are a distant 3rd place. Morph might argue persuasively that getting your soil chemically balanced for micronutrients should come in there at a high level, because that sets up a proper home for all this biology I've been talking about. Watering, mowing, and micronutrient balancing are independent of which kind of fertilizer you use. You have to water and mow anyway, so you may as well do it correctly. Most people who take advice on those topics from their lawn mower salesman or the sprinkler installer get bad information. Watering should be done deeply and infrequently. Mowing should almost always be high (with the exception of bermuda, centipede, and creeping bentgrass (and the further exception of Marathon II and III dwarf fescues)).

I disagree. Compost is not fertilizer at all. It is depleted fertilizer. The stuff that went into making the compost was fertilizer back then, but now that it is finished compost, it has been fully decomposed. The fertilizer value, compared to real organic fertilizer, is nill. Back in the 1930s, J.I. Rodale proposed the idea that compost was the gold standard for organic gardening. That idea persisted until the 1990s when DNA testing on the soil revealed the true nature of soil. Prior to that testing, botanists had been able to grow about 12 different soil based fungi and bacteria in the laboratory. They figured there more than that actually in the soil and proposed that there would be as many as 50 different microbes. The first DNA testing revealed there were 30,000 to 35,000 different microbes. Subsequent testing in the 2000s revealed upwards of 100,000 different species of soil microbes. These are the guys which have been supporting life on the planet for billions of years. All of a sudden the teaching of Rodale was out the window. Feeding the microbes was found to be the solution to organic gardening. Compost has little to no food value left after the concentrated decomposition process. Instead the idea of feeding real food to the microbes came into vogue. The real food of choice is corn, wheat, soy, alfalfa, and other protein sources. These are usually available at your local feed store for $12 for a 50-pound bag and up. The application rate is 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. It can be applied at double the rate with no harm. It can be applied at double the rate every week of the growing season with no harm. The cost per application is about $5 per 1,000 square feet. Compost, on the other hand, can cost up to $75 per 1,000 square feet depending on whether you need to have it delivered. Most people over apply compost bringing the cost to $150 per 1,000. When you apply that much compost to a lawn, it will smother it leaving a bigger mess than ever. Thus I disagree with the idea that compost is as good as anything. It is worse than almost anything and costs a small fortune.

The unmowed photo of side A clearly looks like you have some nut sedge mixed in. I've got some of that too, but it doesn't bother me because it almost looks like St Aug. The nut sedge can easily be removed by hand, but I bet if you cut back a little on your irrigation, it will get choked out by the turf. It looks like there is too much nut sedge to spot treat with vinegar. I've also heard molasses works, but I don't have any experience with that method. Side B looks like you may have some fungus problems. How much are you watering? How often? Be patient and stick with the organic program. It works better, and will cost less long run.