Thanks to everyone for their replies. The grass certainly isn't everybody's cup of tea. (My wife is not a big fan.) I really like it. Every one has green grass. I just want my lawn to be different. I also like variegated plants (you can see my variegated dwarf bamboo in the second photo), so when I found out there was a variegated form of St. Augustine, I went searching for it. I finally found a small nursery in San Diego that had about 100 plugs for sale. It spreads agressively like regular St. Augustine.

Toni, I did e-mail him a thank you note and a photo. At the time he gave me the seeds, I bought over $150.00 worth of variegated St. Augustine grass plugs from him so it wasn't like I was just browsing at the nursery and not really buying anything. It was very generous of him to give me a seed head from his variegated BOP. The variegated St. Augustine grass plugs are filling in nicely. I should have a variegated lawn in my front yard sometime this summer. Here's a photo of a plug.

I have a large area prone to erosion under a huge Arizona ash, under which is complete shade. I needed something to fill in fairly quickly. I've got Kimberly Queen Fern (I think that's it). It borders on invasive the second year, but I need it to be there. It doesn't mind a little standing water, loves the shade, and just leaving the leaves there to rot works just fine as far as feeding it. If we go through a long dry spell, I water a little bit (I run a sprinkler for a hour every other week), but that's it. It's not that hard to control, either--just dig up or pull. I got mine pulled up from a friend's garden, not even in dirt and in a five gallon bucket that sat out for two days. I put down twenty five "plugs" and now I'd estimate the crowd at about 150 ferns. I've also had what I think is called mondo grass under there. It's the common variety, came with the house (I don't care for it, so I pulled most of it up.), but was thick and lush and happy. In the shade, it's very dark, almost black. Caladiums are fun in shade, but I have to either dig them up or replant every year, as they rot down here in 9. My other ground cover is an undesirable....Indian strawberry...I swear that stuff will take over the world.

I just realized you said, 'pest control' every 2 months. I've never applied a pest control product, and you do it every 2 weeks? In all the years on this forum I don't think I've ever seen anyone with a regular insecticide program. I would stop that, get the watering frequency right, and see if the lawn improves. In addition I would get something organic on it soon. Repeated applications of insecticide will kill out the population of beneficial insects. The microbes are important to keep happy in the soil. The general classifications of microbes are bacteria, fungi, microarthropods (i.e. insects), and protozoa. These microbes are so intertwined in the food chain that the scientists refer to it as the soil foodweb. When you remove an entire class of critters from the food web by using insecticide, then the important roles played by that class do not get done, or they do not get done efficiently/effectively. By stopping the application of insecticide (and I'm talking about COMPLETELY), and by adding some organic fertilizer, then you have a shot at restoring the soil's health. Similarly repeated or regular applications of a fungicide will kill out some (all??) of the beneficial fungi required for good soil health. If you ever think you have an insect issue in the lawn, they are usually very easy to identify and treat as needed. When I stopped using all chemicals on the lawn and started using only organic fertilizers and products, I saw a lot of issues go away. In addition to finally getting a green, dense lawn, my insect issues disappeared. I used to have a mess of pill bugs (wood lice). They were so thick they piled up on themselves. When I stopped using the chemicals the pill bugs disappeared. I had roaches in the lawn, too, but not any more. So it was an easy conversion for me to go organic.