Well 3-4 applications of round up was the best I could do...since I was planning on continuing with Bermuda anyways it wasn't a huge deal. I figured I would have some come back but obviously wasn't concerned with that. On the other hand, I may be in the market for a more efficient way if I go the fescue route....

1) Anybody order this seed from Williams or Pawnee Buttes this year? I am under the understanding they are really good, friendly and well priced. Seed Super Store is the closest to me and they carry all of this seed (I'm in Canada by the USA border) but there prices it seems are higher - am I correct? Can you pick up from them directly on location? 2) What do you think about my seed selections? 3) My soil test from the University here (Guelph University) stated all was good but I feel my PH level is high? 4) Shall I apply curative Grub control before or after Aeration? 5) Do I have to wait 5 days after laying carbaryl? 6) Is the secondary treatment of Starter Fertilizer recommended? 7) Any ideas of how to keep birds/squirrels from eating seed? Would Peat prevent them or a seed blanket that I've seen others use? 1. N/A for me. 2. Sounds fine to me. 3. How do you get a pH that high? Do you live on a limestone formation? I happen to live on a limestone formation so I know a little bit about it, but I have a warm season grass so it doesn't count. 4. N/A and N/A. You don't need grub control and you don't need aeration. 4 grubs per square foot is at the low end of normal. You must have other issues. And you don't need aeration. If you spray the lawn with at least 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet (100 ml per 100 square meters) with clear shampoo, water it in with a heavy irrigation, and repeat in 2 weeks, your soil will be almost too soft to walk on for the next year or so. You can never get results like that with an aerator. 5. N/A. You don't need carbaryl. 6. I would apply organic fertilizer on the same day you put the starter fertilizer down. It will have kicked in before you wanted to put the second dose of started down. The two fertilizers do not interact, so you should be fine with that. 7. Peat or a blanket might help, but there is a good chance of burying the seed. Grass seed needs to be at the surface. You say you have added seed and soil every year? How many years? How many inches/centimeters higher have you gone? In my opinion there is only one reason to ever add soil to an existing installation; that would be only if you have standing water that will not drain when it rains. Unfortunately it has become local custom in many places to topdress with soil, sand, or straw every year. Golf courses use sand but for different reasons than you might think. They use machines that apply it perfectly. You cannot ever hope to do it as well as they do. Plus they don't usually have a basement nearby that will fill up with water when it rains because the drainage has changed from repeated apps of soil. Do you know how long it takes your sprinkler to put out 1 inch of water?

$6.50 per yard? It costs me $55 per yard plus $75 delivery. That's a pretty good deal. Okay now get comfortable because you hit several of my pet peeves. On compost: Still even if it was free and someone else put it down for free, I would not use compost the way you're planning. I'm sort of a lone wolf when it comes to compost, but I've been waaaaay over there on the compost loving side in the not too distant past. I come to this point after considerable reflection on the topic. First of all if you are trying to fill low spots permanently, compost is the wrong material. Everyone in the compost biz would agree, because compost will completely disappear in about a year leaving zero volume where it once was. If you need to bring low spots up to grade or higher, search this forum for topics about leveling. Basically you level with coarse sand, water to settle the sand and reveal new low spots, level again with sand, water again, and repeat until it is perfect. Try not to create a huge mound of sand, but that's preferable to a low spot. I've seen football fields crowned up with sand as much as a foot in the center to get their drainage right. Secondly I think compost as a soil amendment is way overrated. Ever since Rodale started writing about compost back in the 1940s it has been the fundamental basis of organic gardening. Well, things have changed. Prior to the 1990s nobody knew what the microbial content of the soil was. About all they knew was that compost seemed to help things when piled up around plants. That's one thing, but piling it up around grass can smother the grass itself. So first of all, do no harm. But back to the topic, what is compost? Compost is the decomposed product created by a blend of many organic materials ranging from real food to animal dung. The pile is created and left for the materials to decompose. Periodic turning allows all the materials to decompose and mixes things up plenty. In the end, excellent compost will smell beautiful and look just like the perfect soil amendment, but what it is is the depleted remains of all those food stuffs along with the depleted remains of the billions of microbes that did the decomposition. The key word to me is depleted. Compost is a depleted product when compared to the original ingredients that went into it. The original ingredients contained protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. In completed compost the original food value is gone. All the goodness of that food value got wasted in feeding the compost microbes and nothing else. What I'm going to suggest is that you use the original feed stock that went into the compost instead. Go ahead and make your own compost if you want but instead of relying on it to feed your soil and plants, use an organic fertilizer like soybean meal, alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow), corn, corn gluten meal, cottonseed meal, or any other ground up nut, bean, seed, or grain that you can find in a brown bag at your local feed store. The application rate is 15 pounds per 1,000 square feet. When you do it this way, the soil microbes decompose the food (and no it does not stink at this rate) and the decomposition byproducts become plant food after 3 weeks. This happened in the compost pile, too, but there were no plants in the compost pile at the time. So that plant food got wasted by other microbes. Pity. Okay I'm off that soapbox and on to the next one. NEVER ROTOTILL IN PREPARATION FOR A LAWN. Was I shouting? I suppose so. Maybe if I shout I won't have to write so much about this topic. If you rototill you will hate yourself for the next 3 years as your soil settles and becomes bumpier and bumpier. Mixing compost in the soil is almost never a good idea from the git-go, but just churning the soil without compost is not a good idea either. The problem is you cannot control the depth of the tiller. It will hit rocks and roots and launch itself up out of the ground. It will hit soft spots and dig down and down. The end result is a rolling contour underground with lots of fluffy soil on top. When you level the surface you might have 3 inches of fluffy in one spot and 8 inches of fluffy in other spots. As all that fluffy soil settles, it settles down to the original rolling contour left by the tiller. That leave the surface bumpy. Option 3: Start this project at the end of summer. End of summer varies in the US from late August to late Sept. The more north or higher altitude you are, the earlier it is. Begin by leveling the surface with sand as needed. Cover directly with seed. Roll the seed down with a water fillable roller to ensure good seed to soil contact. Finally water for 5 minutes 3x per day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner time) for at least 4 weeks to get 80% germination on your selected varieties of grass. All you're doing is keeping the soil surface moist but not soggy. You don't need to cover the seed with anything as evidenced by the fact that Mother Nature has been growing grass for a billion years without covering it with anything. She does roll it down, though, by running grazing animals over it. But if you decide to cover it anyway (and I suspect you will), make it very thin. It is that easy. Once the grass is in at 80%, start backing off on the watering frequency and watering longer. Total watering should be about 1 inch per week until it is established (next spring). Then you'll start with deep watering once a month if no rain and eventually moving to once per week.

Yes that is unfortunate timing, and yes, that is a pretty good stand of lawn without weeds especially considering the timing. KBG is the kind of grass that spreads to fill in thin spots. Usually there is no need for reseeding or overseeding unless there was some serious insect or disease damage in the summer. KBG is also the kind of plant that sleeps the first year after seeding. They say the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, and the third year it leaps. Watering first season grass can be tricky especially since it went in in the spring. The roots are delicate and easily damaged by the heat. Are you watering longer now? Have you done the tuna can test to see how much water your sprinklers put out? I see you are using an impact sprinkler on a tripod. Those are nice in theory, but you will get much more even coverage with a gear driven oscillator sprinkler. If you go with one of those, then 10 or 20 minutes a day is not nearly long enough to help. You might need to go to an hour a day to get about 1 inch per week. As soon as the daily high temps fall back to the 80s, then start to back off on the frequency and go up on the time. I would try to go to twice a week at about 4 hours (oscillator) each time. Generally the tuna can test is to see how long it takes to fill the cans, but for you I would leave the sprinklers on for an hour and measure how full the cans are. The idea is the same; to determine how long it takes to fill the cans with an inch of water. That will eventually be your watering time every time. The only thing that changes is the frequency which changes with the cooling temperatures. As you back off on the watering frequency you should see the grass becoming darker and darker green, which is why you selected those cultivars of KBG.