The best you can do in a shade area is to have a thin lawn. The only dense grasses in full shade are zoysia varieties. Those are very slow to recover from wear and tear from people walking on them. Dogs will rip them up and never let them return. Having said that, there are some ground covers that look like grass but are not true grasses. Monkey grass is one of those. There is a dwarf variety that looks much like grass. Most of the ground covers I am aware of are not fast to recover from damage, though. One alternative you might not care for is to cover your yard with several inches of shredded bark mulch. The dogs will love it and it is not going to be muddy when it rains. Even with two dogs it should never smell like a dog yard because of all the organic critters living in it. Two inches would be a minimum with 4-6 or more preferred.

Yes, I think KBG will do fine in Fayetteville with the proper care. You cant' just plant it and forget about. You must fertilize it at least 4 times per year, and water whenever mother nature does not provide. You can let the grass go dormant during the dry spells, but it's not going to look its best at the end or during the summer. My lawn is doing excellent right now, I can't complain. Mother nature has been VERY generous to us lately, so that has something to do with it. I'm mowing twice per week right now, so still in excellent shape. My PRG is doing better, growing slow/lower than my KBG lawn. I'll be posting picture shortly.

Don't buy regular/common Kentucky Bluegrass (Kenblue is one of them) get the Turf Type or Elites if you will. They are much better resistant to disease and heat. The old ones are probably more drought tolerant, but just a bit more and not enough to overlook at the benefits of the Elite-type Bluegrasses. The best drought tolerant Bluegrass is going to be the Hybrid ones based on various University Studies. They can go about 40 days without water before they start to wilt. Another option is to go with Turf Type (elite types) Perennial Ryegrass. The reason I say this is because if you are not going to water during the summer and your are going to lose some if not nearly all of your turf, then PRG is going to get to work MUCH faster than any bluegrass or Fescue. It germinates in 4 to 5 days, and 2 weeks later you're mowing - a week later you have sod. Dark green, dense, traffic tolerant, fine bladed, and nearly weed free. It establishes so fast that weeds don't have time to germinate. As far as your clay soil becoming hard during droughts, that is accurate. If you let clay soil dry out completly, it can take several rainfall to get it wet and to hold water again. The key is not to let the soil dry out between rainfalls. I understand your situation with the well, but remember that the 2007 summer was as rare as an April snowfall in Raleigh... Dogs can damage lawns very easely, specially if they dig it all the time. They usally like mark the perimeter of the property and create pathways in the process, which they use often. I hope it's not the case for you. Click on the link below for info on Hybrid Bluegrasses: It appears that Reveille is the most drought tolerant of the Hybrid Bluegrasses, it is also generically dark green. Picture was taken on August 12, 2009 at the NTEP site in Raleigh. Here is a link that might be useful: Hybrid Bluegrasses

Brian, thanks for your very informative response. I have been to the Raleigh/Chapel Hill/Cary area a few times while visiting my son who is stationed in Goldsboro and found it very lovely. My DH was raised in a town in Connecticut that had a population of 2200 and now we live in a town with a population of 480. He actually LIKES this. I am all for living in a small town for I like the sense of community pride and commorodity that goes with that but I prefer a small town with at least 15,000 - 20,000 people LOL. My DH also wants acreage. Not a particular desire of mine as long as I am not living on top of someone else. He could never live on a property less than a few acres and that is where we are running into some issues. Due to the type of work he does we need to be within reasonable driving distance to a metropolitan area. I understand that Raleigh and Charlotte are the two places he is most likely to find employment so I have been scouting bedroom communities for both cities. I have found some lovely homes in the Lake Norman district outside of Charlotte as well as some in the Cary as well as Clayton area outside Raleigh. Thanks for the headsup about northern Raleigh and Cary. One thing I know is sure to send my hubby off the deep end is the hummer crowd. We see a lot of that where we live in the Berkshires. My hubby is a sweetheart and hates confrontation but he is also a man comfortable with who he is. Whenever he is amid the keep-up-with-the-Jones type of people something comes over him and he turns into a neanderthal which if it weren't so in-your-face- on his part it would be rather comical. We have the "New York" aka "The Wallstreet Crowd" that own summer homes around the lakes in our area. They are excruciatingly politically correct, pretentious and obnoxious. To protest their invasion every year DH goes out of his way to make things unpleasant for them. He has an old truck that he named Mable. The thing should have been buried about 25 years ago yet he insists on keeping it professing its value for hauling things around the property. At the peak of summer when he is sure to find the snobs, I mean New Yorkers at the one and only general store in the area he insists on driving my little daughter (who does not know any better) to the store for an ice cream cone. I have had the "pleasure" of being on a few of those trips myself and it is rather humorous to see the expressions on these peoples faces as he pulls "Mable" next to their Lexus' or Hummers. LOL...I overheard one man tell his wife "it really is time to sell our place here" after seeing my husband pull in and get out of his truck. She responded "oh dear but we love the lake so". It was the one and only time that I really wanted to go up to someone and tell them how rude they were and how much we looked forward to fall every year to be rid of them. At the time my DH was running his own company and financially was probably doing as well as anyone of these pompous jerks but they judged the book by the cover and thought we were the "poor relations". I managed to hold my tongue and I am glad I did. What do I care what these trogs think anyway and it is a good lesson for my daughter to learn about humbleness as well as seeing for herself how plastic some people truly are. I am all for intellectual dialect but attitudes are best checked at the door.