I'm going to guess it's brown patch / large patch. You'll get some good help in the comments here, but search around on those terms.

I appreciate the responses. I'm going to try and address the variables you mentioned...

-I'm in Huntington Beach ( north Orange County). We have had

-No leaves, and the area in question faces southeast so it gets quite a bit of sun.

- Fertilization: The last time i know of was about 3 weeks ago. The gardeners wrote me a note saying they would be fertilizing and to water at least 3 times that week. I'm not sure what kind of fertilizer was used .

- The lawn is cut every other week, and typically cut pretty short.

- I will snap a pic and post later tonight.

" You'd have to be east of Pomona or east of Grossmont Center in San Diego to get chinch bugs."
Try this first, check for Chinch Bugs.

Here are some pics.. and i know, the thatch rake was a bad idea.

lawn · More Info

lawn · More Info

lawn · More Info

I was sort of hoping you'd be living in Blythe or somewhere where you needed extra water, but no. You will almost never need to water more than once every 2 weeks. On the days when the Santa Ana winds blow, if that lasts longer than 2 days, you might want to water once before your 2 weeks are up. But you do need to water a full inch when you water. If runoff is an issue for you, we have a cure for that, but I'll wait for you to ask. Or if your soil is unduly hard - same solution.

Ask your lawn mower guy to raise the deck all the way to the top for you. Still mow every other week. If he refuses, remind him there are other lawn care professionals who will do it. St Augustine really performs a lot (LOT) better when mowed high. It does not grow any faster when mowed high. In fact there are no minuses to mowing taller. You don't have to go to my mowing extreme, but here's a picture of my chow chow walking through the tall St Augustine at my old house...

That does look like the same fungal disease I get. I get it because sometimes I don't get the tree leaves off the grass before the dew hits it. In your area you have dew 365 days a year, so you absolutely cannot leave anything on the grass. My wife used to leave garden trash on the grass until I 'splained it to her that just leaving it there overnight started the disease process. I'm not sure which disease it is but for me (being organic) the solution is always the same product - corn meal. Corn meal starts a biological chain reaction that eventually (a week or two) kills the disease. Then in 3 weeks you should see the grass returning, by stolons, back to the bare spot. You can try using a chemical fungicide if you prefer. I can't recommend one, because I never use them. The corn meal rate is 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Do the entire lawn because you don't know where it starts or stops. And if you only do the bad spots, you'll have deep green grass in those spots because corn meal is an organic fertilizer. Pick one or the other to try. If you try the chemical and you're not happy with it, you can't use corn meal later, because that biological chain reaction requires healthy soil microbes and the fungicide kills the required beneficial fungi.

Thank's a lot for the info Dchall. I am going to talk with my gardeners on friday and ask if they can set the height on the blade much higher from now on.

What are your thoughts on insects? Does this look like it could be their doing?

Wipe your hand flat across the grass and see if you can flick up some chinch bugs. If you don't know what they look like, go to YouTube and search the videos. But please mute the sound, because they have a lot of counterproductive ideas as to how to deal with them. I doubt it's chinch bugs as close as you are to the beach. They really like it hot.

Next test would be for grubs. Dig up 1 square foot of soil down about 2 inches. If you see fewer than a dozen grubs, you don't have a grub problem. If you see an uncountable mass of creepy grubs, then you have grubs ;-) I doubt you have that, but if you do, please let me know.

Call Midway City Feed on Jackson north of Bolsa to see if they sell ordinary corn meal. You don't want corn GLUTEN meal. If not, ask them where to find it. Cracked corn will work, too. The birds will get some of that but not enough to make a difference. You cannot use too much on bare soil. The only caution is if your soil is not biologically active, the corn can smell a little sour before it disappears. You'll notice it's there even with active soil, but with inactive soil, it's considerably more noticeable and for a longer time. You can get your soil going by dropping about 1 pound per 100 square feet on it. Then in 2-3 weeks you can go to the full 2 pounds per 100.

I really appreciate the info.

I actually went out there yesterday afternoon to do a quick check for Chinch bugs. I went to the edge of where the good grass meets the bad grass, spread the blades out so I could see down through the thatch... nothing. I didn't see a single buggie.

For what it's worth, I had to do some digging in the lawn a month or so ago to replace a sprinkler head. I dug down a good 8" and never noticed anything that I would have thought was a grub... to be safe though I'll pick a spot in the effected area and do your dig test.

The idea with the inspections is to not waste resources and time as well as polluting when insects aren't the issue. I am very careful about that. I am also careful with fungicides, because a huge class of beneficial soil microbes is the fungi. Once you apply a fungicide you're threatening the entire soil ecosystem. It doesn't always result in soil collapse, but I don't like it. You can apply a chemical fungicide, let it work a few weeks, and then dust lightly with compost to reestablish the soil biology. Armed with that knowledge I'm still cautious, but not adamant about not using the chemicals. The soil biology is resilient, but when it goes bad, it's ugly. Organic fertilizers are the cure for almost every ill. Chemical fertilizers are not the cause, but they are not helpful in the solution.

Hi All,

I've done a couple application of cornmeal over the last month and have not seen any noticeable change. Been talking to some people in my neighborhood who have been having similar problems with our lawns. The common thread is that we all used the same gardening service who did their yearly fertilization around mid July sometime. I'm starting to wonder if maybe my lawn wasn't over fertilized...? The problem area has progressed to the point where i can reach down and literally just lift up the mat of dead grass and see soil underneath.

At this point i'm trying to decided what my plan of attack should be for recovering this area. Should I look into planting plugs, or should I just let the grass spread back into that area over time? Should i leave the layer of totally dead thatch on the affected area as a weed barrier or should I remove it and expose the soil?

The plot thickens. Fertilizing in July is normally not recommended; however, in your cool neighborhood, the summer heat would not have been a stress factor. I don't think over fertilizing would cause that dead zone.

Can you post another picture since the corn meal? Have you raised
your mowing height? And corrected the watering? Simply doing those two
things should really improve the look of the living part of the lawn.

I should have taken a picture of my San Antonio lawn this weekend. I have two spots that look just like your dead zone. I have not treated those spots yet this year, but I need to - too danged hot this summer. In the past I remember these spots were very resistant to improvement. I wish I could pinpoint what finally got them back on track. Next week I need to bury those spots in corn meal to see what happens. I'm reasonably certain mine were caused by leaving leaves on the surface too long and cutting off the air to the grass/soil.

Have you covered the basics and measured sprinkler output to determine how long it takes to put down 1" of water? And then started watering that amount every week in the 90s and every two week in the 80s, which is now for you?

That grass looks dead and drying out. A quick fact check "

Huntington Beach has had an average rainfall of 13.33 inches over the last 30 years, which is 66% less than the average nationwide, and 11.38 inches inches less than the average in California."

I also looked at your 2015 rainfall totals. Wow. I hope This website is wrong. You had no rain to measure in 5 months?

California is about to dry up and blow away all together... your website isn't entirely right though. We've probably had 5-6 days of scattered rain over the past 4-5 months.

So with regard to watering, i know it's not ideal but i have been doing it this way for 2 years and up to this point have had a robust healthy lawn of st augustine. And, i still have 70% of a healthy robust lawn, it's just a third of it that has gone south for some reason. To complicate things I have a pretty primitive watering system, so if I want to keep my plant beds (tropical plants) i need to maintain a sort of light but often watering schedule.