My Bermuda was extremely spotty & didn't respond to anything I did in my second year after planting--I called it my teenager grass. Its been great every other year, I think it just wasn't quite established enough yet.

Ha! Yes, I've heard that patience is indeed a key ingredient in proper lawn care. I'm trying to walk the line between being appropriately proactive, and being impatiently hyperactive. I'll let you guess which side of the line my wife thinks I'm on.

Well it only lasted one growing season, but I hope your grass responds better than mine did. Probably wise to aim at the root & soil development this year, I didn't start on that early enough. Any fresh pics of the lawn?

Molasses? Have I mentioned molasses in the past 5 years? Well it won't hurt anything and might help develop your soil bacteria.

What has your watering regimen been for 2015? How long and how often? It's hard to get fungal disease in bermuda unless you're watering an awful lot more than you should.

With your numbers it looks more like sand than clay. Have you ever done a jar test to prove that to yourself? What surprises me is the low magnesium value. With no clay and a deficit of magnesium, I'm wondering why you call it clay. Can't wait to see what morpheus has to say about it.

Sodded bermuda and sodded bermuda which has been overseeded with common bermuda are going to look like two different plants. The seeded bermuda has a more wild appearance. It's more of a pasture grass. All the seeded varieties are versions of common bermuda. The sodded varieties are mutations that happen to look better in many ways.

You might want to search this forum for 'leveling bermuda.' The earliest posts were from Dave Proud. He posted some very good pictures but has since closed his remote image accounts, so they're gone. Leveling is a lot of work, but everyone says it was worth it. Basically you have to 1) fertilize, 2) water, 3) scalp it down as low as possible, 4) spread sand over it, 5) level the sand, 6) water it to settle, and 7) repeat steps 4-6 until you're perfectly happy with it. Then leave it alone. You have to do this in late June or July when the bermuda is growing like crazy. In 30 days you should be very happy. There are some details I left out, but at least this gives you an idea what's involved. Beer and pizza to the participants.

On a side note, your trees need to be unburied. The mulch up against the trunks will allow a fungus to grow on the outside of the bark. The trees will slowly become girdled and die over many years. You need to expose the trunk down to the flare of the roots to stop and reverse the problem.

I've got more pics from the growing season, but its all dormant now. Just a sea of brown with little green islands of the remaining weeds that I didn't get earlier. The Prodiamine I put down last fall has worked so far to keep the flood of winter annuals I had last year away (chickweed, poa annua, and henbit mostly), but I've still got clumping fescue weeds (I think that's what it is) popping up here and there. It's been tough one to get rid of.

Google keeps your responses forever, dchall!...and I've probably read most of them.

Watering was 2x per week, 0.5" each time, mornings. I couldn't get 1" down in a single watering because it starts to run off after 10mins. With breaking the waterings up and giving time to soak in, it'd take hours to get 1" in a day, so I split it over 2 days. Still takes a while though.

I haven't done the jar test, so I'm only assuming it's clay. But there's still active construction in the neighborhood, so there are mountains of whats under my grass all over the place, and it looks like what is described as red clay ("ultisol" according to Wikipedia). But you're right, I should confirm. I fear that not being able to get down more than 4 inches may have biased the soil results and might not be reflective of the real problems. But it was the best I could do without renting a jackhammer.

I've read and read but found no way to definitively determine what type of Bermuda I have. I thought it might be some common variety, but the better the "B1" part got over the season, the more I thought its a hybrid that just hasn't gotten enough love.

Thanks for the leveling rundown. I've gone through the leveling threads on here a number of times, and I plan to make that happen as soon as possible. The results sound great. I'll probably end up hiring someone, but yes, it's definitely a priority.

Thanks for the tip with the trees. Will do!

Yeah it's tough to tell what you have once it gets established--You almost have to do a side by side comparison. Can you pull up a decent plant from each area & post the close ups? Try to get the crown with a stolon or 2. They'll obviously be brown & dormant, but hopefully we should still be able to narrow it down.

This is actually pretty nice for an initial test, although your soil has a bit of a split personality. That happens more often than you might think...

EC 4.2/5.7: These are close enough to call them pretty similar. Both are sandy soils, certainly with some silt or organic matter enhancing the EC.

pH 5.2/6.1: The B1 section is in range but a tad off, the F1 section is rather low and calcium deficient. I discuss both below.

OM 2.5/2.4: Photo finish results, and both in the Fair range. With an EC that low, I wouldn't mind seeing these come up a lot, so always mulch mow, consider feeding organically, mulch all fall leaves, and consider importing fall leaves from other properties that don't have severe disease and weed pressure.

Sulfur 48/33: Both kind of high, which is not a problem. You probably have some gypsum in your soil.

Phosphorus 44/80: This is the first thing costing you quality. We use off the shelf starter fertilizer to fix it, and just get the cheapest. The differences between them aren't significant enough to matter. Recommendations below.

Calcium 35%/63%: Abysmally low in the F1 section, in target but a touch short in the B1 section. We use calcitic lime to correct this, and I only recommend the use of Encap, Mag-I-Cal, or Pennington Fast Lime. Other limes require far more mass, work more slowly, and add elements you don't need or want to add in this manner. Recommendations below.

Magnesium 12.3%/10.0%: F1 is enhanced by the low calcium, so it actually does need some. While we're at it, let's enhance B1 a little bit. We use Epsom salt for this, available at most grocery stores and drug stores in the First Aid or bath sections. Recommendations below.

Potassium: 4.0%/4.6%: It looks better in F1 than it is, due again to the lower calcium. I'd like to enhance that section. We use potassium sulfate (sulfate of potash) to do this, available at some landscape or garden stores, or they can usually order it for you. Barring that, you can get this online. Recommendations below.

Minor Elements: While there are some oddities here, with a schedule this busy I've only chosen to discuss boron (important) and iron (optional).

Boron <0.2/<0.2: Deeply deficient. 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 12.5 tablespoons of 20 Mule Team Borax.

Iron 72/61: Both numbers are low for good color. To raise this, you can apply Milorganite whenever you like (it won't interfere with anything in this schedule or any other) to very slowly boost this. It takes a while.

Recommendations:

March 15: Apply calcitic lime (Encap, Mag-I-Cal, or Pennington Fast Lime) at 3 pounds per thousand in the F1 section, 1 pound per thousand in the B1 section.

March 22: Apply 20 Mule Team Borax in Milorganite carrier at 5 tablespoons (very specific and don't screw this up!) per thousand square feet.

April 1: Apply starter fertilizer at bag rate.

April 15: Apply 2 pounds per thousand Epsom salts to both sections. Apply 3 pounds per thousand potassium sulfate to section F1 only.

May 1: Apply starter fertilizer at bag rate.

June 1: Apply starter fertilizer at bag rate.

July 1: Feed with a high nitrogen fertilizer.

August 1: Apply starter fertilizer at bag rate.

September 1: Feed with a high nitrogen fertilizer.

September 15: Apply calcitic lime (Encap, Mag-I-Cal, or Pennington Fast Lime) at 3 pounds per thousand in the F1 section, 1 pound per thousand in the B1 section.

Thanks for the detailed explanation morpheus! Excited to implement your suggestions.

Biggest surprise is this idea that my soil is sandy, as you
and dchall said. I’ve really got to try the jar test, but nothing about the red
mushy-when-wet and concrete-when-dry stuff that’s under all of our lawns here
seems like what I would think of as sand or silt.

Surprised my phosphorus is low. I put down two applications
last year (total of 10lbs/1000sqft) in starter fertilizer. Maybe the sandy soil
allowed it to leech pretty quickly?

Definitely not surprised the OM is so low. I used no
organics last season and bagged almost all of my clippings to try to reduce the
weed seeds deposited to the lawn. Hopefully that pays off with far fewer weeds this
year.

In general, how big of a player is boron in the equation? If
I had everything else in the excellent range, how would a lack of boron affect
the lawn?

I’ll basically be out-of-commission for yard work in March. Is
it better to do the first lime and borax applications in late Feb, or wait
until early April?

I was planning on switching to primarily organic
fertilization this season (milorganite) so many of your recommendations are
right in line with that. I’ll probably be augmenting the fertilizer
applications with milorganite, so I’d
like to see how the grass is doing by July 1 before I hit it with a synthetic
all Nitrogen fertilizer.

reeljake: it's tough to get good samples, but here's a shot. From left to right: F1, B1, and my neighbor's Bermuda from the landscaper that the builder is currently using. I don't see any obvious differences even when looking up close, except for the length. You can tell B1 and my neighbors are cut really high (he cuts his extremely high).

The numbers say sandy, but it could be a mix of sand and a very low EC clay, like Bentonite. That's...well, extremely unlikely, let's just say that.

P doesn't leach very easily, it's actually strongly soil binding even in pure sand. Ten to one, your soil wasn't just low before the two applications, it was deficient!

You can pull the March apps back to late February if you like, as I'm guessing your soil will be unfrozen at that point. Or delay until April--whichever is convenient for you is just fine. If you push both March apps to April 15th with the magnesium, that would be fine. You're more likely to lose a little to leaching doing it that way, but we can resynchronize next year.

It's tough to say from that height, but b1 sure looks denser right off the bat & has what looks like good stolons. I can't say it's definitely hybrid, but stolons are absent on the other 2 as far as I can tell. Of course it's fairly young & dormant & mowed way too high, so I wouldn't bet money.

Why are you shying away from the boron? Boron is an essential micronutrient. Having said that it's also a powerful poison when dumped willy nilly. Morph will keep you safe with the milorganite application approach.

If you have an opportunity to do a jar test on the piles of soil sitting around the neighborhood, that might be interesting to compare with your own soil jar test.

When a soil is concrete hard when dry and mucky sticky when wet that screams too much magnesium to me. So I was surprised by your test and your description.

Google, huh? Nuff said. You might want to bring up specifics to see whether I might be contradicting something I might have believed back in 2002. Because most of what I believed in 2002 has been changed by this and other forums.

Thanks morpheus, plan going into action.

reeljake, lets give it another shot when things green up. Definitely will be an easier task I think.

Definitely not shying away from the boron. Just genuinely curious about what its primary role is. A good way to understand that for me would be to know what would happen without it.

Interested to hear what your current thoughts on soil softening with a surfactant are, dchall. Your posts and those of a few others were more than convincing enough to at least give it a try, and my mind was all but made up after having so much trouble getting that soil sample.

If you read my posts prior to about 2012 I had another method for softening the soil. It required soaker hoses and months of moving them around the yard. Then I read morpheuspa and andy on another forum and their use of surfactants. They put together a really good mix of chemical and organic surfactants. You can buy all the stuff on eBay. I'm not going to do anything that requires that much hassle, so I tried it with shampoo. It worked amazingly well and fast especially compared to my soaker hose method. Since I'm all about making this less hassle, even if it was my personal method for soil softening, I've abandoned the soaker hose approach and pushed for the use of shampoo. If you want to know more about the mix of chemicals and organics, morph can help you. I sprayed my yard with shampoo back in 2012 and it still gets very soft when it rains and pretty soft when I water it.

If you read my posts prior to about 2011 I was unaware of the benefits of alfalfa pellets as a fertilizer. Then mrmumbles posted his picture of an alfalfa trial in his yard. OMG! I started posting that picture on the forums I participated in. Pretty soon I was hearing about it in the organic gardening shows on the radio. When I went to the feed store to get some, they asked me if I wanted it for the lawn or for rabbits. What the hell? How did THEY know? Well, apparently the word is out on alfalfa, and I attribute it to this picture from mrmumbles.

And if you read my posts prior to about 2004 I have changed my watering from every day to deep and infrequent.

And if you read my posts prior to about 2007 I was pro compost. Then I went to ambivalent about compost. In about 2012 I went to anti compost - not because it's bad but because it's waaaaaay too expensive to put on a lawn. $5 of alfalfa has about the same fertilizer effect as $75 worth of compost (depending on your cost of compost) and it comes without the back breaking labor. So now I say if you need microbes fast, use compost. If you need fertilizer or even organic matter, use anything organic but compost.

And prior to about 2002-4 I mowed low. That works for bermuda, but it's a mistake with St Augustine, fescue, and Kentucky bluegrass.

So other than all the important elements of lawn care, my opinions have stayed about the same.

Always learning is always the best plan, I find!

Looking forward to having my own tales of learning and discovery in a few years. I just hope my lawn doesn't suffer too much through those trials and, errors...and errors.

Lawns are surprisingly tolerant of many mistakes, particularly if your soil chemistry is up to the task (the plant will have most of what it needs, with only nitrogen in play as a potential problem).

Done organically, most mistakes aren't mistakes. I've tried low levels, high levels, extraordinary levels, and back-breaking levels of feeding. It all works, it just gets slightly better as you go up the line.

For oddball things, like shampoo, kelp, and the like, it's similarly difficult to mess up. Been there, done that, had no problem.

A little update and a question:

Encap lime went down March 5 and Borax/Milo went down March 12. I hadn't realized how small of an amount 1 lb/1000 for the lime was. That was interesting trying to measure that out using my broadcast spreader.

With the Borax, getting it to stick evenly to the milorganite was a challenge. Either the Borax clumped up, or sifted to the bottom. Eventually it seemed ok, but it's tough to know for sure.

Today, one day after applying, we're getting heavy rains, and there will definitely be runoff from the lawn. Do you think I just lost my borax application?

You're fine. Borax is pretty water soluble, so most of it washed into the soil with the first part of the rain. Later runoff didn't carry it away because it was already too deep (and slowly binding to the soil).

Excellent, thanks. I lightly watered it in just after applying it yesterday, so it sounds like it was already getting to work before the rain started.

Then you're doubly fine! Borax is used in dishwashing detergent and in the laundry. It'll dissolve quite well in limited amounts of water--the evidence being that it doesn't cake onto your clothes or dishes!

Salt imbalance (metal ions like magnesium, calcium, sodium, and potassium) can cause even sandy soil to get mucky. Once you get your salts up to where they're supposed to be, and your organics up, the soil should be transformed.

Another little update and another question:

Yard is greening up nicely. Section F1 is trailing far behind B1, but I'm not concerned at this point. Since I last checked in I've continued with the plan and added a 24-25-4 starter fertilizer. I supplemented that with Milorganite at 1/2 label rate.

Next up in the soil plan is the epsom salt and potassium sulfate this weekend. I *could* put that down, but I'll be aerating in 2 weeks though,at the same time as my next starter fertilizer and Milo application. So if I wait and apply the epsom salt, the potassium sulfate, and the fertilizers at the same time, they'll have the benefit of deeper soil access. Should I worry about applying those at the same time though? Is there the potential to burn the grass?

Update: The lawn is looking great!

I've followed your recommendations so far, morpheus, along with a few extra apps of milo here and there. It's a deeper green than I've I've ever seen, and it's getting thick too. I'm dealing with some weed pressure and dollar spot fungus, but overall I'm very happy. Thanks everyone! Can't wait to do the next soil sample to see how far it's come.

Looking good! Why do you think you have damaging fungus in a bermuda lawn? It's not impossible, but it is pretty rare for Bermuda to get anything other than toadstools.

Not sure, but I had it last year too. From what I've read, it seems that this fungus thrives when the leaves stay damp from dew for more than 8-10hrs. So when it's warm and humid in the day, and cool at night, it can happen. That's definitely happening now. Grass is damp all night and doesn't completely dry until maybe 9am. I've read that dragging a garden hose over the grass in the morning will knock the dew off, which should help. That and some nitrogen, but I think I'm probably fine in that department.