Just to add: the lot size is 0.8 acre.

Only my lawn looks like this. Neighbors on either side have great looking lawns.

For a really new house, that's actually not bad.

How old is the house? And what have you done so far, if anything? Are you OK with the idea of getting a soil test and fixing the soil, and what's your goal for this lawn?

House is 25 years old (sorry-my original post is perhaps misleading). We just bought it - haven't done anything yet.

I can get a soil test. I did that a few months ago for another house we didn't buy in the end. So I have at least a basic grasp of getting the soil test and what kind of recommendations that would provide. I'm happy to treat soil if it's best. I just need guidance on when/what/how to do it.

My goal is just to have an acceptable green lawn. Doesn't need to be pristine. We might also make a small vegetable garden.

Thanks so much for the detailed advice! I have read it, and understood, but I'll go over it again when I get home and follow up with any questions.

I'll take a soil test next week. Unless there's a reason not to, I'll use the service at University of Delaware again.

How large is this yard? What do you have for watering it? Watering is likely going to be the biggest challenge if you don't have an irrigation system.

Yard is 0.8 acre.

I don't have any equipment at all yet, but I'm willing to consider and pay for anything if it makes most sense.

For 0.8 acres, you may or may not be able to cover it with 2 long-distance tripod sprinklers and some moving around. If watering three times a day is difficult, it might be easier for you to spread the seed, then spread up to 1/4" (no more) of peat moss over it. It'll help hold some moisture.

An irrigation system certainly is nice, but not necessary if you're only inclined to use it for seeding. I think, for a month I'd bite the bullet and resign myself to moving sprinklers morning and evening. It doesn't take much water to get the seed to sprout, so that's good, it just has to be damp as constantly as possible.

So around 34848 square feet. One inch of water over 1000 square feet is 623 gallons. To water this one inch (one inch needed weekly in hot weather when there is no rain) would require 21710 gallons of water. Are you sure you want almost an acre of lawn to mow and water and fertilize? Call an irrigation company to come out and give you an estimate on installing irrigation. Better yet, first call a landscape designer to come up with a landscaping plan with a smaller lawn area.

Or let nature take her course through most years, which will be fine. The bluegrass will go dormant and awaken in late August or September when temperatures drop and rainfall hangs around a bit longer.

Rye and fescue don't have as good a dormancy mechanism, but to compensate they're more drought tolerant and send far deeper roots (particularly in Maryland sand).

Irrigation is only technically required during long drought periods, and only 1/4" every two weeks. Quite often, we'd get that in thunderstorms through the period, but there are certainly droughts where we don't.

Alternately, as Becky suggests, turn part of it into another type of planting. Trees and evergreen shrubs can be very attractive and reduce lawn area. Most annual and perennial gardens will be time and effort intensive, so I wouldn't count on those too much, but blooming shrubs and trees can certainly add some color to spring and summer landscapes.

Thanks again to you both for the advice. I'll weigh up my options.

One question in the meantime - what do you think could have caused the damage you see in the photo. I have a sellers photo from December showing it nice and green. Then now, 8 months later, it looks dead. And as I mentioned earlier, it's only my yard that has suffered. Grass on neighboring yards is good. I wondered if a careless maintenance company cut it too short, too often, and killed it? Nobody has lived in the house for 8 months. I presume someone was contracted to mow in the owners absense while the house was for sale.

DECEMBER 2014

AUGUST 2015 (8 months later)

maybe they overseeded with winter rye or something like that.

+1 Jeremy. An overseed with really cheap grass seed would contain a fair amount of annual rye. Germination is unbelievably fast, so if they stopped there, the grass would look great. It'd continue to look great until about June, when it would start to take damage.

I'm a little surprised it lasted this long. Annual rye and the like usually drop in July.

So what's likely to happen if I did nothing at all?

It is strange. I would expect a yard full of crabgrass at least. We have a second home at the river on a 2 acre plot. We have never planted grass, never fertilized, never watered and the yard is lush with weeds, mainly crabgrass now. We just keep it mowed (which takes 4 hours a week, which is a considerable chunk of time). I keep thinking maybe we should offer some of it to a farmer to plant wheat or beans or something on. We have part of it in azaleas and parts are mulch beds of pine needles under the pine trees. We also have blueberry bushes, fig trees, apple trees. It's a lot to maintain and I can't imagine trying to do grass there. Instead of grass we have mowed weeds and right now it looks better than the tttf in Richmond which is struggling with the August heat.

If you really can't stand it, your best bet would be to till it up and either re-seed or re-sod..in either case, irrigation is going to be your main issue..If it were me with space that big, I'd be looking for a more drought tolerant ground cover

Another idea: dormant seeding over the winter. Sometimes people who can't water have luck establshing grass that way. Do some reading on dormant seeding. You could do an area around your house with a fall seeding as Morpheus described (whatever you can water with hoses and sprinklers) and try a dormant seeding for the areas your hoses don't reach. You might also consider clover, which has pros and cons.

JockScot: >> So what's likely to happen if I did nothing at all?

BeckyInRichmond: >>It is strange. I would expect a yard full of crabgrass at least.

That's why I suggested the soil test in this instance even though our target isn't a showcase lawn. Even the weeds are patchy, which might mean a collapsed soil that has very little in the way of resources.

If that's the case, a reseeding will look fine through fall (when it runs off the resources in the parent seed) and winter (when no great resources are necessary), start to fade in spring, and die again in summer.

With the summer we just had, which featured more than adequate rainfall, I would have expected a field of crabgrass, oxalis, and a ton of broadleafs of every imaginable species. That shot with the two people shadows in it is almost bare.

That's not normal, but doesn't look insect or disease caused. There's no insect or disease that would take out a field of diverse weed species all at once other than, maybe, a very large cloud of extremely obvious locusts.

>>You might also consider clover, which has pros and cons.

I never object to adding some nice clover into a new seeding as it provides some nitrogen to the grasses that share the same field. Even a section of pure clover can be very nice but, as Becky noted, has some cons.

Most notably, if anybody in the family is allergic to bees or very afraid of them, skip the clover. If you have young children who play on the lawn, clover might not be the best idea there either as bees object to being stepped on.

Jeremy Milrood: >>your best bet would be to till it up

Please don't a lawn under most circumstances (there are a few occasions where it does make sense). It makes the soil uneven, takes years to settle, never settles entirely evenly again without special treatment, destroys natural drainage channels in the soil, and temporarily (for soil definitions of temporary, which is a few years) damages the soil biology.

Warranted, in that soil, the drainage channels will re-establish quickly and I doubt the soil biology is any great shakes at the moment, but there's no sense inviting problems.

I'll revise my response by saying that my only experience with putting grass down has been using sod, and I've always had good success when I lightly tilled the top layer of soil..

be very curious to see what a soil test from those areas would say..

If you were just scarring the top of the soil? No objection there! It'll probably help with sod-soil contact and doesn't appreciably disturb or damage the soil structure. Weed sprouting isn't much of a consideration when sod goes right over the top, either.

Full tillage is usually to a depth of three to six inches (or even more), with disturbance problems getting worse the deeper you go.

In this instance we're, unfortunately, pretty tight on time for fall. Since corrections can go with the seeding and shortly after, I don't particularly object to beginning the reseeding process here without a soil test. The new sprouts, although very delicate, aren't that sensitive to soil chemistry at first due to the seed supplying them with everything they need.

And yeah, I'm dyin' to see this one myself--I wonder if I'm going to be very, very surprised and it comes back well, or if I see what I expect (very low phosphorus and calcium levels, incredibly low EC, low organic matter, tolerable magnesium, and lowish potassium).

If you want Morpheus to interpret the soil test, he probably would prefer you use Logan Labs in Ohio instead of U of Delaware since he's familiar with the Logan methods.

Exactly; plus we're really happy with Logan's reliability.

I'm happy to use Logans if you folks are willing to check out the results and make some recommendations. I have no strong preference. I just know the UofD gives you a bit more of a graphical report along with recommendations on how to treat the soil to achieve whatever goals you specified.

I looked at logans sample report and to my untrained eye it was just a bunch of numbers.

If I use logans, is there Standard test ($25) all I need?

The Standard test supplies more than enough information (I don't use all of it giving a read as some doesn't matter in most cases). And I'll be the one reading it. :-)

Ok, I'll be collecting the soil samples tomorrow and hope to mail them the same day.

Thanks for taking the time to analyze the results, I appreciate it.

Soil test is on the way to Logan. Tracking shows me it'll be delivered Thursday.

In the meantime I have a few snippets of new information. All to be taken with a pinch of salt...

The neighbor tells me the lawn looked good a few months ago but it grew very high in the 2 months the house sat empty. It then appears to have been cut very short.

A different person (friend of the sellers who we got talking to) also said the lawn looked decent enough in recent months but seemed to die off quickly. They suggested it might bounce back on it's own.... but they were obviously just guessing, really.

Does this evidence suggest the lawn could be sitting mostly dormant? I'm not sure... I just know I've read bits and pieces about certain seeds being suited to colder conditions versus others preferring warmth (and therefore they are greenest at different times of the year).

I suppose it's possible it would bounce back. I was accounting for the fact that you haven't had a dry summer, so full dormancy is unlikely (mine hasn't even gone far enough to get all that shocked this year, and that's without any irrigation).

While you wait? Take a 2 gallon watering can (or whatever's convenient, down to a couple glasses of water), and water just one section of that lawn. Repeat immediately as soon as it gets dry, which might be daily. Our goal here is to keep about a square foot or three of the soil moist at all times to see if the grass bounces back out of dormancy.

Edited to add: Include a few drops, two or three, of any liquid soap (non-bacterial) occasionally when you water to increase water penetration and accelerate the roots' return.

If it's going to, it'll be showing signs of doing it around the time your Logan test comes back.

Wife and I are going to be out of town for the next few weeks (apart from the odd day here and there) so it's unlikely I'll be able to perform your test with any real consistency, but if I can make it happen I will.

Soil report received today. I haven't had time to digest it - I'll try to look at it tonight, but for now here it is for you all:

Whatever your issues are, your soil chemistry is not the primary cause. This test came back with two things that should be fixed, but only one is really all that problematic and would give you thinner, less attractive grass rather than no grass at all.

I do discuss the important sections below, with recommendations right at the bottom.

ME 10.1: This is not sand, it's a sand-silt mix in all probability. It holds decent resources, and drifts slower than sand, which is good. It's more water-retentive than sand as well.

pH 6.7: Always a symptom, never the disease, but there's not even a symptom in this case. While at the high end of perfect, this is still perfect.

OM 4.1%: At the low end of Good. Always mulch mow, mow all your fall leaves into the soil, and feed organically when you can. This is not an emergency in the slightest, we just want to maintain the soil.

Sulfur 9: A completely reasonable answer.

Phosphorus 132: This is low, but not deficient. However, it should raised into the 200 range or a little more. We use starter fertilizer to do this, just get the cheapest as they're all in the same ballpark for phosphorus application. Recommendations below. I synched the starter applications with the proper time to feed a newly seeded lawn (or an established one, for that matter).

Calcium 73.5%: Perfect. It's a touch high compared to the given optimal range, but nobody ever objects to a little extra Ca.

Magnesium 10.9%: Perfect. That little -26 deficit is unimportant and can be ignored. It would be difficult to meter in half a pound of magnesium per thousand square feet anyway, and it's unnecessary.

Potassium 5.4%: Perfect. I'm a fan of a little extra potassium for heat and cold resistance, plus insect and disease resistance. This is where I'd set your soil, give or take some.

Sodium 1.0%: Insignificant. Sodium is a toxin, so low levels are a good thing, and this number is perfect.

Minor Elements: All great except for boron and manganese, although I did mention iron below.

Boron 0.26: Very low, and this should be corrected. We use Milorganite as a carrier and 20 Mule Team Borax as the boron source. You can purchase 20 Mules at the grocery store in the laundry section. In a wheelbarrow or the like, dump the Milo. Spraying very, very lightly with water (I use a spray bottle like the kind people use to damp their clothes when they iron) will help the boron stick. Add the recommended amount of 20 Mule Team Borax and stir, spraying occasionally to get the stuff to stick to the Milo. Then apply over the recommended area. So if going for bag rate Milorganite (1 bag per 2,500 square feet), you'd add 10 tablespoons of 20 Mule Team Borax.

Manganese 145: Extremely high. This won't cause problems (I have a similar level of Mn in my soil), but it does get in the way of uptake of several other resources, most importantly (in this case), iron.

Iron 99: At your pH and manganese levels, this won't produce the best color, but it certainly isn't deficient or low. Any time you like, you can feed the lawn with Milorganite to slowly raise your iron levels. Extreme color changes in any grass won't happen until you raise the iron levels somewhat above the manganese--and what you end up with depends on the grass type and cultivar you choose. Some are naturally darker, some lighter, but all will attain optimal color with good iron levels.

Recommendations:

Seeding Time (around September 1, give or take): Apply starter fertilizer at bag rate.

October 1: Apply starter fertilizer at bag rate.

October 15: Apply 4 tablespoons (not a misprint) of 20 Mule Team Borax per thousand square feet in Milorganite carrier.

Memorial Day, 2016: Apply starter fertilizer at bag rate.

Morpheus- I can't thank you enough for your time and detailed advice.

I'll definitely follow your recommendations. Do you have any advice as to what grass seed I should use?

For a "just want it green and looking nice" lawn in Maryland, I'm thinking a good tri-mix (Kentucky bluegrass, fescue, and rye) to give you the best of all worlds (and the worst of a few, but that's pretty minor).

I'd probably just get a standard grass seed. But I'd be sure to look for one with 0.00% noxious weed seeds, and the smallest percentage of weed and other crop seed as possible.

"Sod quality" seed is the best, containing no noxious weed seeds and extremely minimal other seeds that aren't grass. You're unlikely to find that in a local store, but I suppose it's possible...

Understood. I'll look around and see what I can find.

Regarding application rate - are there different rates for lawn repair/reseed versus new lawn establishment.

I guess my question is- will, looking at the seed bag, I know what rate to apply seed?

The bag will tell you the rates, and in this case the rates are actually pretty accurate.

If you buy it from a specialty supplier, they usually tell you the rates on the Web site, or if you ask, but it isn't often printed on the bag.

And yep, rates differ depending on whether you're reseeding or seeding a new lawn (essentially, I'd say you're mostly seeding a new lawn).

They also differ by type of seed, with Kentucky bluegrass getting seeded at a far lower pound per thousand square feet rate than fescue or rye does. KBG seeds are tiny things, fescue and rye are quite large. Plus KBG can be seeded at an overall lower rate than other grasses since it spreads all by itself to fill holes (if well fed), so a lower rate is sometimes an advantage.

If you find a seed you like but aren't sure of the rate, ask. What's in the bag will tell us the seeding rates.