Okay Gary, I'm glad you wrote in months in advance to get your plan checked over. NEVER TILL to prepare for turf. Yes, I realize every single book ever written about preparing soil for turf has you tilling it. I used to work for a "pre-landscaper," the guy who prepared the surface for the landscapers on new construction. Actually his title was "finish grader." Tillers are never used. I never knew why until I spent a few years reading here at GardenWeb. The tool used to prepare the soil and make it drain properly is a box blade on the back of a real tractor (large back wheel and small front wheel). If you hire a real landscaper, or a finish grader, your entire yard can be done in a morning (unless you have a sprinkler, lots of trees, fences, decks, or patios). All the work is done at the surface and no deeper than an inch. Your underlying soil structure is important to conserve and tilling turns it to an uneven powder. When that uneven powder settles, it settles unevenly. After a few years, the result of a tilled preparation is a rolling surface at best and usually more like moguls that need to be refilled with sand or soil to even things out. The finish grader will know if you need more soil (you don't) and will grade the surface so that rain drains away from all buildings and away from the property. You cannot do that by hand. You also cannot rent a tractor and do it yourself unless you've been doing it for 5 or 10 years. To assume it is compacted is a mistake. It might be very hard and not very absorbent but compaction is more than that. You can improve the absorbency with a soaker hose set on trickle. Try it. It's free. Set the faucet to a trickle at the faucet and leave the soaker hose running 24/7 for up to three weeks. You'll be startled at how soft your soil becomes. The reason is the return of soil fungi that have died out. The boringly slow soaker provides just the right moisture without shutting off the air for them to come back to life. At the end of three weeks (you'll have to do normal watering still) your soil will be like a sponge. It will be very soft when wet, very hard when completely dry, and it will absorb water quickly when it rains or you irrigate. That is what you're looking for. You don't need to till or add any amendments to achieve that. If I only was allowed to add one thing to ANY soil, it would be a surface application of ORDINARY corn meal (from a feed store) or alfalfa pellets at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Here's a plan for this summer. At the end of summer you might decide you don't need to renovate. 1. Deep water but no more than once a week in the heat of the summer. If your first few waterings have a lot of runoff, stop watering and let the moisture settle in. Then come back before the day if through to finish. I water for up to 3 hours per zone, once a week, and my zones overlap by 50%. Then let the soil dry out completely. If your grass wilts before a week is up, water again but for longer this time and try to go a full week. The deep watering develops deep roots that really build your soil's health. The long delay between waterings allows the surface of the soil to dry out and prevents weed seeds from sprouting. 2. Reset your mower to mow at the highest setting and don't bag your clippings. Tall grass does not grow faster than short grass. Tall grass is needed to develop the deep roots because short grass cannot produce enough sugar to grow really deep roots. Tall grass also shades the soil so the soil remains cooler during the days and loses less moisture to evaporation. Tall grass will also keep dandelions and many other tap rooted weeds out. Clovers and spreading plants will still grow, so do what you like for that. I like to pull them by hand. If I have to suggest spraying with something, I start with vinegar on a hot day. If you have to use a chemical Weed-B-Gone spray on each weed is much better than broadcasting dry weed killer everywhere. If you do these first two things, you should really never have serious weed problems. Insects and diseases are different, so keep an eye out for them. 3. Fertilize with your favorite fertilizer on a regular schedule. I like organic fertilizer, but I'm not sure it makes any difference to the weeds. Insects don't seem to be a problem anymore with all the toads, birds, and lizards that have returned to my lawn since I stopped using chemicals.

I can't say much about the long term since I've only been living in this house for a couple years but I'm strongly with the "the heck with em" camp about pests and diseases. I do try to rotate my gardens around (not planting the same thing in the same spot all the time with annuals.) I am very firmly against buying bagged dirt, Just costs way too much. I do get mushroom compost when I can and I have used the free compost from the county too (ya just gotta watch out for glass in it.) We collect most of the neighborhood bagged leaves and grass clippings for the gardens and compost. We ask tree services working in the area if they need a place to dump the chips they can do it at our house. We compost and have a worm farm. I figure the more biologically active I can make the soil, the less likely the negative stuff can out compete and proliferate. About the only things I've sprayed as pesticides or whatnot, were thruicide, organocide, and neem. My biggest problem seems to be potassium deficiency. I spray with maxicrop but that gets costly when I have most of my yard growing squash, pumpkins, zucchini and cucumbers that are all asking for more potassium (powdery mildew tends to attack those plants when they are weak on potassium.) Anyway, most of my gardens started as "lasagna gardens" with cardboard and mulch and mushroom compost. We don't till though occasionally we will for or spade through a bed after harvest to try to get rid of most of the annoying grasses. I can't really see replacing soil though if a particular bed or area seemed to get "toxic" I would probably knock it down and leave it fallow if I couldn't find something that wanted to grow there as a cover crop. I only add organic matter. I don't buy "top soil" or even "sand". I don't even buy bagged potting mix anymore. I just make a mix of old garden or potting soil mixed with new mushroom compost, other compost, some home mixed organic fertilizer and worm castings and call it new potting mix. I figure the more composted stuff around, the better everything will be inoculated to the possible diseases. I can't say for certain the long term effects of my methods as they have only been going on a couple years but I seem to be doing well so far. Here is a link that might be useful: TCLynx

Many kinds of maples are adapted to heavy soils and are planted in them by the thousands, as along streets for instance. It is the Japanese maple that is unusually touchy about drainage. If this planting site is big enough your best bet would be to excavate the clay soil and replace with lighter soil. If it is a narrow strip and the area becomes quite wet even that may not work, water coming in from the sides. Planting a tree or shrub over loosened soil is not a good idea because as the soils settles after planting the new specimen may sink to a level below the desired depth. Digging organic matter into a heavy soil will not have a lasting effect on the texture of the soil as the organic matter will gradually decompose and disappear. Even when non-decomposing amendments such as sand are used to alter the texture of backfill if the planting area is a small one there will still be the problem of how water moves into and out of the planting area being affected. Small areas of one soil texture surrounded by a much larger area of another are often a setup for problems. A large bed of soil amended with sand or similar material will also pose the problem of what to do when the dug over area rises up like a loaf of bread after the amendments are dug in - unless a soil already has a fairly high sand content a huge amount must be used to alter the texture of the finished bed significantly. If you can't excavate and replace a wide area of soil there or put a layer of more suitable soil over the top then it many just be that you can't safely plant Japanese maples in that particular spot. However, since you are in a fairly mild climate zone possibly it would be acceptable to plant them in suitably large tubs and place these on top of crushed rock or other covering in the same location.

I use bermuda grass and then whatever is growing in the pastures...which is virtually everything. I wouldn't use bermuda grass if it had formed seedheads. That batch would go into the compost pile so the heat of composting could sterilize the seeds. To prevent anything in the grass clippings OR the soil from sprouting and growing up through the mulch, lay down newspaper or cardboard and then pile on the mulch. If there is any wind, wet down the cardboard or newspaper as you lay it down so it won't blow away before you pile on the mulch. The newspaper or cardboard serves as a barrier. Weed seed beneath it cannot sprout because of the darkness and if it sprouts, it generally cannot penetrate the paper or cardboard. Weed seed on top of the cardboard or paper may sprout, but any plants that sprout in the mulch can't grow down through it and it is easy to pull them out of the mulch when you notice they've sprouted. As a bonus, earthworms adore newspaper and cardboard so having them on the ground attracts them to your soil and since they improve the soil, that's a plus. A couple of tips: 1) Never use any grass clippings from lawn treated with herbicides, including weed and feed fertilizers; 2) If the grass is holding a lot of moisture after it is cut, I leave it in the garden cart or wagon for a day or two and let it dry and then I spread them on the beds; 3) If you have cut tallish bermuda in humid, hot conditions (especially in late spring/early summer) and think chiggers might be lurking in there, spray yourself with an insect repellent before you spread the grass clippings. Then, after you're done, scrub yourself thoroughly to remove any that may be climbing around on you. I have chigger issues about once a year after spreading grass clippings DH has cut and it usually happens in late May or early June. 4) Be very picky about your grass clippings. If neighbors see and understand what you're doing and offer you theirs, make sure their lawns haven't been chemically-treated. 5) If you have an issue with snails, slugs, pill bugs or sow bugs be sure you leave a little open space (at least 1/4") between the mulch and plant stems so you can spot those little buggies and sluggies and kill them dead. (I just sprinkle Slug-Go Plus in that little open area so they can find something to eat. It is just a bonus that the 'something' they find to eat kills them.) Dawn