To address a few of your points, there is no shade in my yard. It's full sun.

I haven't touched any fertilizer or anything yet. Only thing I have done so far is mow it. This is the first season my wife and I have been in the house so I'm just now beginning my lawn plan.

The picture below is exactly what we moved in to. The only thing I have done so far is Weed B Gon it for the crabgrass and clover. I'm in the process of getting a soil test done now. I truly would prefer 100% TF because I love the emerald green as opposed to the darker green of the KBG. But since it's already in my yard and it's got good summer tolerances, I figured I'd work with it.

Can you get a better/closer picture of the brown area on the other side of the tree? Judging by the color it appears to be dormant bermuda but I could be wrong.

Also, get a close up of the lighter, yellower grass you're calling rye. This could actually be POA Annua. I'm not 100% but it looks like I'm seeing some POA seed heads in the photo. Again, I could be wrong but a few close up photos of you're weeds would help identify them.

Oh boy I sure hope it's not Bermuda. If so I've got a whole other problem as well. I'd be tempted to just napalm the whole yard if I didn't have to look at a totally brown yard for a few months.

Here are a few other pictures. Not as close as you asked for but I can try and snap a close up later today.

Yep, closer would be much better. That first picture does look like dormant bermuda but still too far away to tell for sure.

Here's a closeup.

Also, are these weeds or sprouts of Fescue?

Temperatures in the mid 80 to near 100 will stop ryegrass growth. Any higher and it will die.

When you get a mix of grass like what you have and you want to stay with fescue, it's best to kill it off completely and replant using a variety of fescue suitable for the south. With many different mixes of fescue planted over the years, you end up with some lighter patches, some longer patches, some fine blade patches, etc and it looks bad.

it looks a lot like dormant common Bermuda in your pics. Everything else looks like various weeds.

I'm in the Charlotte, NC area and I watch people struggle with fescue year after year. If you don't have irrigation or can't afford it, fescue won't do well in this area. Some years you get lucky and get enough rain for the fescue to do okay but usually, it's just dry and hot all summer long.

I had a few small spots of bermuda show up in my yard at one of my properties. I tried removing it but gave up. Instead, I mower about 1.5 inches and promoted the bermuda. Within 2 years, I had the nicest lawn in the neighborhood. It does require a lot of work, however. I had to mow every 4-5 days and if you missed a mowing, it was really hard to get the grass back down to a desirable height. It's also more prone to having lots of weeds.

At my current house, I put down some zenith zoysia sod in the backyard area where my dogs play (due to the mud) and used zenith zoysia seed on the sides and the rest of the backyard. The front is still fescue but I'll be converting it to zoysia this year. I refuse to water the fescue so some years it would go totally brown for weeks or months until the next big rain and it would green up within a week.

I'm not sure how far north you are in NC or how shady your yard is but if it's warm enough and you get enough sun, I highly recommend a coarse leaf variety of Zoysia. If you don't mind waiting for it to grow in and you can afford the irrigation, zenith zoysia seed is what I'd recommend. It's like a carpet and I've never had a weed in it and have never put down and pre-emergent or weed killer. Only light applications of fertilizer.

Excellent comments klawn. Bermuda is not the boogie man. Nicest lawn on the block is common with bermuda if you know what you're doing. Doing it right is not any harder than doing any other grass right. One you mow high and one you mow low. If you get those mixed up, you have problems.

Klawn I'm curious to know how the Zenith is doing with the dogs. When they tear it up, does the grass come back quickly? The zoysia I have will not recover from damage in the same season it was damaged.

Frankly we never hear anything good about zoysia at this forum...except very rarely. It must be zenith that is the good one. The fine bladed varieties are more trouble than they're worth.

Thanks a lot to both of you guys!

Klawn,

I'm right up the road from you in Hickory. My yard is full sun. To be perfectly honest, I just don't like the look of Bermuda. For years and years I've loved and admired the taller grass types that stripe really well. I'm leaning more towards a KBG/Fescue blend.

You lead me to two questions. I didn't realize there were different fescues suited for different regions? I was planning on using Scotts Tall Fescue but then noticed they have what they call a Fescue Southern Gold Mix. So you're saying there are actually different blends in those more suited to certain regions?

Lastly, suppose I do want to kill this Bermuda. Hit it hard with Roundup?

Yep, it does look like you have some common bermuda growing there. I'm a little northeast of Charlotte and while I agree that it (bermuda) can make a great lawn it's biggest downfall for me is that you will have a dormant, brown lawn from mid October through mid to late April around here. Another disadvantage can be the low mowing height as well. If you're lawn isn't pretty smooth and flat at lower mowing heights required by bermuda you can end up scalping the high spots. A big advantage to bermuda is that most any damage to the turf will repair itself if properly taken care of. It's also really hard to get rid of it if it's reasonably taken of.

Tall fescue around here will stay green all winter if properly fertilized in the fall. It also likes to be cut taller which is an advantage if your lawn isn't smooth and flat as you likely won't get any scalping while mowing at 3 or more inches. The big disadvantage though is the water requirements during our hot, dry summers. My lawn is 20k square feet and watering just once per month increases the water bill from the typical $15 to $20 up to $140 or more. My parents lawn is only 1,500 square feet and their summertime water bill is hardly noticeable when watering the lawn 1" per week. Also, there is a good chance you will still need to overseed each fall as you'll likely have some losses over the summer. As you can see, there are pros and cons to each type of grass.

If it were my lawn, I would concentrate my effort through the summer on improving the soil and killing off some of the weeds. From there I would make a decision sometime around late July if a full renovation was needed or things were nearly good enough and just give it a good overseed with fescue. Depending on the size of the lawn would also be a factor in the decision. Doing a reno on 20k square feet is a big expense and a ton of work. Mine took a total of 3 full days of hard work and nearly $700 to do. My parents 1,500 square feet reno was less than $50 and took me about half a days work. It's up to you to decide where you want to go with it and then the folks here can help you get there.

Thanks forsheems. My yard is a smidgen under 15,000sqft.

In regards to your comment about overseeding with fescue, I figured that would be pointless with my crazy mix of grasses at the moment? (The Bermuda, fescue in spots, and blue grass in spots.)

In your case a complete reno would probably be much less work in the long run. Spend time now doing your research and improving your soil structure as much as possible. You'll be way ahead of the game come late summer and seeding time.

Great.

Since I'm new to all this, when you say improving my soil structure...what exactly do you mean? Lime etc obviously, but if you are referring to fertilizers etc won't that just make my awful grass grow even quicker?

Only use lime if a soil test indicates that you need it. Most soils here in NC are acidic but you should have that tested to determine what kind and how much lime you need. Everyone here recommends the Logan Labs soil test. There test gives you tons of information and if you post the test results here there are a couple guys that can read it and and put a plan together of things you need to do.

Improving the soil structure involves bringing your soil to life. Synthetic fertilizers feed the grass but do little or nothing to feed the soil. Using organic fertilizers such as alflafa, corn, soy bean, and even milorganite feed the soil microbes which in turn feed the grass. I spent years on the Scott's program and while my lawn was decent it just wasn't nearly as good as I wanted it to be. Since switching over to mostly organics my lawn is 100% better. I still use urea for my fall feedings and winterizer but the rest of the year I only use organics.

Getting started now will increase the organic material in your soil and make it a much better place for turf grass to live. Yes, whatever you do now will cause both the weeds and grass that are already there to grow and be much healthier but the nice thing about that is healthy plants respond much better to herbicides. Come the end of July you will get a much better kill rate with Round Up as a healthy plant will absorb the herbicide much better taking more of it into the roots. Speaking of Round Up, don't buy the expensive brand name stuff. Take a trip over to your local Tractor Supply and pick up a jug of 41% Glyphosate (same ingredient as Round Up) for way less money. Keep an eye on it and you can catch the 2 1/2 gallon jug on sale for around $60 or so.

Spend some time doing your research. dchall here on the forums has a lot of helpful information on using organics and is always happy to help you out. I've learned a lot from folks like him and Morpheus here on the forums and the proof is in my lawn. Definitely ask some questions and listen to the advice you get. By this time next year you'll start seeing people driving by real slow staring at your lawn. Fair warning, your neighbors are probably going to hate you.

Haha! Excellent information forsheems! I am about to collect my soil samples for the Logan Labs test.

THANK YOU for the Tractor Supply tip! I didn't know that. I was crunching the numbers on the price per sqft of Roundup on Lowe's website and was getting frustrated! By that standard, it was gonna cost me $400 in Roundup to kill my yard. I knew something couldn't be right.

So you're saying the more marketed type stuff like Scotts really only feeds the grass and not the soil yet the organics actually helps the soil?

Lastly, it's too late into Spring here in NC for me to attempt a renovation isn't it? Is Spring even a time to renovate?

>>So you're saying the more marketed type stuff like Scotts really only feeds the grass and not the soil yet the organics actually helps the soil?

Exactly. For the most part. All the big companies now have organic feeds available, but the price per pound is rather expensive and the percentage of the feed that's actually organic varies.

It's so much cheaper and easier to simply use corn, soybean, cottonseed, and so on.

Synthetics do very little for the soil as there's not much to them except nitrogen salt, potassium salt, and phosphorus salt. Organics bring complex carbon compounds to the mix, in addition to leaving a residual that improves the soil's water retention, structure, and encourages the life in it.

Yes, spring is not a good time for seeding. The grass seed will sprout but it can't establish roots well enough to make it through the heat of summer and will normally die out. Fall is the best time. For you it will be early September for seeding.

It's hard to explain organics in a nutshell, but I'll try. Organic fertilizers are made from ingredients like corn, wheat, soybean, cottonseed, flax, and animal byproducts (feathers and poultry poop). In other words, it is made from food that animals eat ('cept for the feathers and poop). These are relatively high protein materials but also full of carbohydrates. It's food. The microbes that live in the soil are the same ones that cause food to spoil. So what's happening when you apply organic fertilizer is you are essentially feeding those microbes. The good news is that the beneficial microbes eat this sort of food directly and pass along their own byproducts to other species of microbes and so on. There are roughly 100,000 species of microbes living in the soil. Eventually (3 weeks) when the food and microbial byproducts have gone through enough stages of food chain, the resulting byproducts are plant food. This is how Mother Nature fed Her plants for the billions of years before ammonium nitrate was discovered. Every time an animal pooped or died and every time a plant deposited seeds on the ground, the microbial food web took over and started to fertilize plants.

The following picture usually helps people get off the fence about organics. The picture was posted here on GardenWeb by mrmumbles. He put down alfalfa pellets in mid May and took the picture in mid June. If you look hard enough you can see a spot in the middle of the picture where the grass is darker green, taller, and more dense.

Not too hard to see, is it? It really does work.

Oh and a lot of people renovate in the spring and end up with crabgrass lawns by July. So fall is a much preferred time to renovate. Unless you are renovating with bermuda. Then do that in late May or June.

WOW! Thanks a lot to all three of you. Definitely has me thinking on a different track now.

I guess I just wanted to renovate now because I'm impatient lol. I want my lawn to look like all these amazing lawns I see on here but didn't want to wait 3-4 months.

So essentially with the organics and in terms of soil preparation for my fall reno, I need to be feeding this hot mess of a lawn I currently have as if I liked it?

Okay so you don't have prefect timing. Had you asked the question last August, timing would have been perfect and you could have done the reno. But if you follow the following guidelines, your weeds will be much nicer than anyone else's weeds.

Basics of Lawn Care

After reading numerous books and magazines on lawn care, caring for lawns at seven houses in my life, and reading numerous forums where real people write in to discuss their successes and failures, I have decided to side with the real people and dispense with the book and magazine authors. I don't know what star their planet rotates around but it's not mine. With that in mind, here is the collected wisdom of the Internet savvy homeowners and lawn care professionals summarized in a few words. If you follow the advice here you will have conquered at least 50% of all lawn problems. Once you have these three elements mastered, then you can worry about weeds (if you have any), dog spots, and striping your lawn. But if you are not doing these three things, they will be the first three things suggested for you to correct.


Watering
Water deeply and infrequently. Deeply means at least an inch in every zone, all at once. Infrequently means monthly during the cool months and no more than weekly during the hottest part of summer. Do not spread this out and water for 10 minutes every day. If your grass looks dry before the month/week is up, water longer next time. If that does not work, then you might have to water more than once per week during the summer's hottest period. Deep watering grows deep, drought resistant roots. Infrequent watering allows the top layer of soil to dry completely which kills off many shallow rooted weeds.

You will have to learn to judge when to water your own lawn. If you live in El Paso your watering will be different than if you live in Vermont. Adjust your watering to your type of grass, temperature, humidity, wind, and soil type. It is worth noting that this technique is used successfully by professionals in Phoenix, so...just sayin.' The other factors make a difference. If you normally water 1 inch per week and you get 1/2 inch of rain, then adjust and water only 1/2 inch that week.

Mowing
Every week mulch mow at the highest setting on your mower. Most grasses are the most dense when mowed tall. However, bermuda, centipede, and bent grasses will become the most dense when they are mowed at the lowest setting on your mower. In fact there are special mowers that can mow these grasses down to 1/16 inch. Dense grass shades out weeds, keeps the soil cooler, and uses less water than thin grass. Tall grass can feed the deep roots you developed in #1 above. Tall grass does not grow faster than short grass nor does it look shaggy sooner. Once all your grass is at the same height, tall grass just looks plush.

Fertilizing
Fertilize regularly. I fertilize 5 times per year using organic fertilizer. Which fertilizer you use is much less important than numbers 1 and 2 above. Follow the directions on the bag and do not overdo it. Too much is better than too little*.

At this point you do not have to worry about weed and feed products - remember at this point you are just trying to grow grass, not perfect it. Besides once you are doing these three things correctly, your weed problems should go away without herbicide.

* This used to read, "Too little is better than too much." Recent test results show that you cannot get too much organic fertilizer unless you bury the grass in it.