This one's interesting. What's your location and what type of grass do you have? The soil either shows severe over-liming or a naturally high-lime soil. The higher sodium level implies the latter, but... The grass type will determine the phosphorus setting. Most nothern lawns and some southern lawns require more fiddling here than a few southern ones do. The EC of nearly 15 says you have a good soil that holds lots of resources. Exactly what it is, you'd have to do a jar test. pH 8.0: Extremely high, but a lawn will still grow in this. Organic matter 3.55: In the good range, although I'd still try to push this much higher due to your high pH (and consequent very high calcium, Phosphorus 45: Short to extremely short due to the pH locking it up, but it's going to depend on your grass type. Let me know on that. Calcium 81%: High, but certainly not toxic or anything like that. We'll want to avoid lime and most calcium sources, however, simply because you don't need them. Magnesium 12%: Optimal. Again, we'll be avoiding sources of these to avoid pushing up your pH any further. Potassium 1.39%: Lower than I like (I prefer potassium levels of 3% or a little more for most lawns, and I go much higher in my own). Sodium 1.86%: Nudging a little high, but not a problem for grasses. This goes into the "keep an eye on" column and if it continues to head up we do something about it then. Most trace elements: Good to excellent, with no adjustments required. I'd be hesitant to adjust most of these with the pH that high and with two major nutrients requiring adjustment anyway. Iron 191: Very low for your pH, but not deficient. Lawns are likely to be a paler green than they would otherwise be. High pH binds up iron, and at that pH even chelated sources of iron simply won't work. Fortunately, using MIlorganite over time will work and add a lot of iron to the soil over time. Over the shorter term, you can spray iron (Bonide iron or 4 oz ferrous sulfate per thousand square feet) for color if you really want to. Current Recommendations: Now: Let me know your locale and grass type. September, as soon as you can: Apply any starter fertilizer at bag rate. Starter fertilizers have large middle numbers, like 20-27-5 or 18-24-5 or that range. Get the cheapest, the differences in that middle number aren't enough to matter and bag rate will target around 1 pound phosphorus per thousand square feet. September, one good rain or irrigation post the starter Locate potassium sulfate (most garden shops will order it for you, as will many landscapers, but this is not a common nutrient). Apply at 2 pounds per thousand square feet. Buy plenty, you're going to need it. I'll hold off on October recommendations until I know your locale and grass type; I don't want to risk ground freeze too early, nor overdoing things for your grass.

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?

The fastest way to get rid of St Aug is to never water it and mow it as low as possible. Your mowing height looks good. You have considerable shade, but not too much for St Aug. It will be much more dense in full sun, but it will survive in that. The second fastest way to get rid of it is to get a fungal disease started. When you get a disease then adding more sod just contributes to the amount of dead grass you have. The only way I've been successful getting rid of disease in my St Aug was to use corn meal at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Corn meal, as it decomposes, attracts a predatory fungus that feeds on the disease fungus. It takes 3 weeks to see improvement and another 3 to see recovery. Corn meal is also an organic fertilizer, so it's not going to hurt anything if you want to put some of that down. A close up of any St Augustine you have left might be enlightening. Close up means 3 inches away. Most people water improperly. Watering should be deep and infrequent. Deep means 1 inch all at one time. Infrequent means no more than once a week in the hottest heat of summer. With temps in the 80s you can back off to once every 2 weeks. With temps in the 70s no more than once every 3 weeks. The rest of the year you can water once a month. Watering like this should make it very hard for a fungus disease to get started. It should also minimize weed pressure. Mow at the mower's highest setting. I think you've got this one figured out.

What’s the advantage of organic fertilizer like Milorganite? Yikes! How many days do you have to read replies to that question? First I'd like to demonstrate that organic fertilizers produce results like chemical fertilizers. Here is a picture... That pic was posted here by mrmumbles in 2011 (thank you again for posting it). What he did was scatter a handful of alfalfa pellets into his zoysia lawn. He applied it in mid May and took the picture in mid June a month later. Clearly the turf is more dense, greener, and taller than the surrounding grass. So organic fertilizer works, but how? For the past multi billion years Mother Nature managed to grow stuff without the benefit of Monsanto, Bayer, and Scott's. Something must be going on. As it turns out nobody really knew what was going on until DNA testing became cheap enough to literally test dirt in the mid 90s. In the lab scientists were only able to grow maybe a dozen or so types of microbes from soil. What they found in DNA testing was roughly 100,000 different species of microbes including fungi, bacteria, protozoa, microarthropods, and other types of critters. People had seen improvements in soil and plants from compost, but they were not really certain of what caused the improvements. Suddenly with the DNA tests, everything they could see happening in soil could be explained by the enormous complexity of what has become known as the "soil food web." It is a food chain so complicated it has no beginning or end. Without being able to absolutely prove anything, this complicated underground biology could explain plant health, disease, and "self" protection. Further DNA investigation found at least 20 layers of microbes growing on the exteriors of plants in view of full sunlight. This environment had been considered to be too hostile to grow microbes, but apparently not. If you would like to read more about soil biology, search for the Soil Biology Primer, but Dr Elaine Ingham. It's about 50 pages long, so get comfortable. But what about organic fertilizer? Organic fertilizer is food. It is made from grains and animal byproducts and becomes food for the microbes when scattered on top of the soil. At the surface of the soil there live insects and microbes which specialize in decomposing stuff that falls on the ground. This would be dead plants and dead animals. Those surface species leave their own byproducts on or slightly under the surface for other microbes to come along and clean up. After going through 30,000 species or so, one of the microbial byproducts is natural plant food chemicals. If there are roots in the soil, the plants will absorb the plant food chemicals and improve their condition. Milorganite is made from "animal" (human) byproducts from Milwaukee. Some people have an 'ick' factor about that so they use other organic fertilizers. Other organic fertilizers include everything you see bagged commercially plus raw grains like corn meal, corn gluten meal, alfalfa meal/pellets, soybean meal, and any other ground up nut, bean, seed or grain you can find in a plain generic 50-pound bag at your feed store. Generally the application rate for grain type fertilizers is 15 to 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. People have tried to overdose by applying double that rate or more on a weekly basis throughout an entire season, but there seems to be no limit as to the goodness you get. Well the practical limit is around 70 pounds per 1,000 square feet when you start to smother the grass under the mass of fertilizer. The drawback with grain type organics is that it takes 3 full weeks to see results. Don't expect to see anything overnight or even in 1 week. It really does take 3 weeks. By that time you're tired of expecting it and suddenly realize that it looks great. My personal experience with organic fertilizers started in 2002. I won't bore you with more detail about that, but I've used nothing else since. I had problems with my soil "crashing" from too much chemical fertilizer. Based on that and others with similar experience, I have come to recommend to pure Scott's users to either add to or replace an application of chemical fertilizer with one of organics. Do that once a year and your soil should never crash. My explanation of crashing is that the microbes become unbalanced from undernourishment over years (decades) of nothing but chemicals. The rebound on my lawn was very dramatic from the git go. Your lawn looks great already. Still I would give it one shot of organics per year. The organics and chemical fertilizers work so differently that there is no interaction. You can apply both at full bag strength on the same day. Is that more than you were hoping for?