dkdive: Just leave your trees alone. They will rise or fall as you originally planted them. Above all, do not ever soak cherry roots in water. Water is not the issue here, unless there is so much water around the tree roots from rainfall that they have drowned. Excess moisture can kill cherry trees. They need to grow in a spot with good soil drainage. Cherries can also be slower to leaf out than other species. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

I do see some grass in the picture, but I see more weeds. If you want to grow grass in a heavily shaded area there are a few options. Fine fescues are hardy, relatively low maintenance, and have a lot of shade and traffic tolerance. Poa supina is a lighter green grass, that is very shade tolerance, and once established spreads aggressively and tolerates a lot of traffic. Improved poa trivialis is a medium green grass that spreads, but is very soft, and handles traffic poorly. You won't find these at the big box stores (well some of the fine fescues you will, but not the better cultivars). The better performing fine fescues you can buy online. You can find out which ones do well in your area at the ntep website (www.ntep.org). Before you seed that area you need to kill everything first. Use round up. Round up takes 1-2 weeks, so if you want to seed around Sept. 1, you need to apply round up around August 15th. Don't seed now, the best time for the grasses I mentioned are in the late summer for the Chicago area.

You've probably seen the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If your landscaper is at a loss as to whether the soil chemistry is good or bad and cannot figure out how to fix it, then you need to fire him. He's not a landscaper, he's a lawn mower. A landscaper would have had the soil tested at the beginning. And a landscaper would not have continued to bring in more and more top soil. At this point, before you do anything, you need to take a hard look at your drainage. Is your lawn crowned significantly (higher) in the middle and sloping off to the sides? Is the whole area on a slope (which could be mitigating circumstances)? When it rains does any water collect and puddle on concrete near the house? If so you should have the soil removed which is blocking your drainage. <img src="http://bloy.net/images/2013/07-21-large.jpg"> Water should drain off of concrete into the soil, not the other way around. If you're getting this then soil needs to be removed. Once you've established a final soil level (whether you remove soil or not), get the soil tested at Logan Labs in Ohio. Then post your results here on this forum. Look down the forum topics list for other Logan Labs soil tests to see what you get by posting the results. The basic test is $25 and is all you need. When they ground the roots, did they remove the ground up chips or did they bury them in your yard or the hole where the stump was. Sawdust or wood chips should never be buried or rototilled into the soil. There's a long biological explanation for why, but essentially the decomposing wood underground robs nitrogen from the soil leaving none for the grass or other plants. It can take 10 years or more before the soil can recover from buried wood. If your wood chips were scattered on top of the lawn, that should be fine, but just not buried. If they were buried or raked in, that might be a good reason to remove soil from the surface. Is there still much shade in this area? What was your watering schedule for when the new seed was down? How often and for how long? And what is your watering schedule for the rest of the lawn? Where do you live? What kind of grass were you seeding?

Give it pre-emergent now (if grown last fall), starter fert by May 1 (only this year) and be ready for a lifetime of thin blades that grow to 3-4 inches and flop over. Fine fescue adapts to shade, and doesn't grow 5 to 6" high standing up straight like turf type tall fescue and kentucky blue grass. They put the "tall" is tall fescue for a reason ;)