As long as you have fresh, green grass, the rabbits will go for that first. Rabbits only eat alfalfa pellets when in captivity and they don't have anything fresh to eat. But having said that, once you put the alfalfa pellets down, you should moisten them (not drench them). They will swell up like giant green worms and fall apart. Once they have swollen up, they become hard to eat for any critter except the microbes. If you want to be sure, you can drag a push broom over the swollen pellets and they will fall apart down into the turf. Rabbit poop is an excellent fertilizer! There are no liquid fertilizers for a lawn that are worth anything. Even Medina Hasta Gro is not good. Why? Because a lawn needs pounds and pounds of nitrogen. Liquids can apply fractions of an ounce and nothing more. Liquids are good for what we call micro nutrients. Besides, Medina Hasta Gro is not organic. If you listen to Bob Webster on weekend morning radio (550 AM), he is very organic but does not seem to understand that Hasta Gro is a chemical fertilizer. You can soften your soil now so that it will accept the moisture. Spray 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet of baby shampoo or any clear shampoo. Spray that on your watering day right before you water. Then water a full inch all at once. Measure that inch with tuna or cat food cans. Next week water normally. The following week repeat the shampoo before watering. After the second treatment your soil should be considerably different. It should feel soft under foot right after you water and get hard again during the days before you water again. This takes the place of core aeration. This is not a trick or a gimmick. The only difference between this treatment and what the professionals use is they spend $70 per gallon for their surfactant and you will pay $1 for 15 ounces of Alberto Vo5 or generic baby shampoo at the dollar store. The shampoo will last a long time if you water weekly in the summer and monthly in the cool months. The last time I did it was 2011 and my soil still feels soft when wet. I use an Ortho adjustable hose-end sprayer to spray shampoo. It doesn't matter what adjustment you use if you do it like this. Measure your lawn. Let's say it is 2,000 square feet. That means you'll need 6 ounces of shampoo (that's a minimum by the way). Pour 6 ounces into the sprayer bottle and fill it with water. Then you can use any setting on the sprayer as long as you spray evenly and spray it all out onto the grass. One of the gurus on another forum tried this using 50 ounces per 1,000 square feet every weekend and there were no problems. We know that 3 ounces works and we know that 50 ounces won't hurt anything, so it appears very hard to make a mistake with this.

I finished aerating my lawn on Saturday, and I put down (12) bags of Milorganite after aerating. I can't wait to see what this does for the lawn. I made a separate post for the aerating, and I will continue to post here once I continue with the leveling project. I have some pictures of the back yard that I took after I cut the grass on Friday (before aerating), that I am going to try to post here. I also took a couple of pictures of the weeds I need help identifying that I will post separately.

Yes, this forum has been hugely helpful! Happy to blab on about my experience. Once everything is green and growing strong, the two bermudas aren't easily distinguishable. However one greens up faster than the other, so in early spring there's a pretty clear line. This was March 31, 2016:With the pattern of green shoots I'm seeing now, it's probably going to look similar in a couple of weeks. Oddly enough though, they seem to go dormant at closer to the same rate. I've thought a lot about the question of what single thing made the biggest impact. I've got neighbors asking what I do, and when I try to explain the details of soil analyses and pre-em and boron, their eyes glaze. So ultimately the answer I've settled on, and that I think is most correct, is cutting frequency. If I could cut everyday, that'd be best, but over the summer I manage about every 4 days. My neighbor on the right takes great care of her lawn too, but mine I think is slightly stronger and denser because she cuts at most 1x per week. I also have a patch out back that is the same Bermuda sod but its in an odd area so I often go weeks without cutting it. The grass there looks like a completely different plant. It's thin and lanky with super thick blades and lots of brown stem, whereas the maintained area it butts up against is dense, short, with narrow blades and not nearly as much brown stem below. Really cool to see the difference cutting makes. The next most important thing (a distant second I think) was the milorganite, mainly because the iron content gave my grass a unique deeper blueish green compared with my biggest competition in the neighborhood, which happens to be my neighbor on the right. If I were rich, I'd be right there with you reeljake, and do the leveling again this year. Just enough to get those ruts out. But it's just a cost thing. Now that my grass is no longer a disgrace, I've got some other landscaping that I should probably prioritize. Another nice lawn I track has clearly been leveled many many times. It looks great, except for it sitting about 5 inches above the sidewalk. Fortunately for the homeowner, it a pretty steep hill, so no matter what, I don't suppose drainage would be an issue. Not the case for me. Absolutely right that the leveling company left too soon. They started while I was on lunch break, and they were diligently working while I watched, but I had to get back to work and left them to their own for the last part. When I returned they were gone and I kinda felt like since they knew I wasn't watching, they could cut out before really finishing and maybe get started on another job. Ah well. Next time I'll make sure I can stay until the end. Beach sand, ha! You just might be right. Come to think of it, they advertised a special blend of sand+topsoil, but that's clearly not what I got. Whatever it was, it was coarser than what everyone else in the area is using. My neighbors on the left had a company come in with a ridiculous amount of what looked like mortar sand. They covered about 5k sqft of lawn with 2"-3" of sand. Amazingly, the Bermuda eventually came back from that smothering. Theirs seems to still be fairly level and with less rutting than mine. They cut far less often, and they have lots more foot traffic with their kids playing on it, so it's not easy to directly compare I guess. But I am really interested to figure out the rutting. From what you're saying, dchall, it's not necessarily my mowing that's causing it. it's just a pattern that the sand is settling in that encouraged by the shape of my grains. Finally, the aeration was supposedly for what reeljake explained: reduce stratification. And nope, they didn't sweep up the plugs. If you look carefully in the first pic I posted, you an see the plugs being dragged along. Most of them broke up pretty fully, as I don't remember seeing any once they were done.

And take pictures on a cloudy day if you can. 3 inches is a good distance. Wait until April to spot spray the weeds with Weed-b-Gon or Weed-b-Gon Chickweed, Clover, and Oxalis Killer or equivalent. That gives the grass and weeds time to get a little healthier. Don't fertilize until Memorial Day. Don't use weed n feed (EVER). Why? Because note that weed killing is done in April while fertilizer goes down a month and a half later. You don't do both at the same time like wnf products do. Don't buy and lawn seed until you know what you have. The only (popular) southern lawn type that takes seed is common bermuda. Hybrid bermudas should not have common bermuda seed mixed in. No matter what warm season grass you have, it spreads. If it looks dormant or thin now, it will perk up very soon and fill all by itself. Watering: Deep and infrequent is the mantra for watering. This is for all turf grass all over the place. Deep means 1 inch all at one time. Put some cat food or tuna cans around the yard, and time how long it takes your sprinkler(s) to fill all the cans. Memorize that time. That will be the time you water from now on. My hose, sprinkler and water pressure takes 8 full hours to fill the cans. Your time will likely be less. I like gentle watering. As for watering frequency, that depends on the daytime air temperature. With temps in the 90s, deep water once per week. With temps in the 80s, deep water once every 2 weeks. With temps in the 70s, deep water once every 3 weeks. With temps below 70, deep water once a month. Note that you have to keep up with quickly changing temps in the spring and fall. This deep and infrequent schedule works in Phoenix and in Vermont, so it should work for you. The reason for deep and infrequent is to grow deeper, more drought resistant roots and to allow the soil to dry completely at the surface for several days before watering again. If it rains, reset your calendar to account for the rainfall. I aerated one of my lawns in the past 50 years. It did not improve anything when I did that. What finally fixed the lawn was fixing the watering and switching to organic fertilizer. Mowing height recommendation will come after we know what kind of grass you have.