Looking at pictures of mole damage I don't think it is that.

It could be vole damage. I've never seen any holes, though, or heard of anyone around here with voles.

A couple of time in the season I dug some test patches to look for grubs and didn't find any. I did that because we could smell a skunk was coming by the house for a while and I wondered if a skunk was causing the damage digging for grubs.

We have sprinklers.

What is your watering schedule?

It runs for 7 minutes twice a day, a total of 14 minutes a day. There is a rain sensor so it doesn't run if it has rained. In the spring and fall I turn it to 60-70% seasonal adjust.

I run it for such a short time so frequently because of the clay. Any longer and the water just basically starts to puddle.

Well then maybe it's too wet. Dig into the dirt and look at it, see if you find dust or mud. Also maybe your fertilization scheme has not been adequate. If it were me I'd skip the poisonous herbicide combo as well, for human (and pet) health reasons.

Your nearest USDA Cooperative Extension office may be able to help you.

Maybe we can help you understand your soil so you can work with it and stop blaming it. I would start with a jar test and then go to a real soil test. If you know where the two different soil types are, then get two soil tests. ...and I guess to two jar tests.

JAR TEST:

Get a straight sided jar like an olive jar. Fill it half way with soil. Carefully fill the jar with water without shaking it. Put a couple drops of dish soap or shampoo in it. Put a ruler up against the jar and take a picture showing the total height of the soil. Then put the top on the jar and shake it up real hard. Set it down with the ruler next to it. After 2 minutes, take another picture. Leave it alone and take another picture after 2 hours. Leave it alone and take another picture after 2 days. Divide the measurement after 2 minutes by the total height to get the fraction of sand in the soil. Subtract the sand measurement from the height after 2 hours and divide by the total to get the silt fraction. The rest has to be clay. After 2 days if you can see through the water, you don't have clay. I predict that you do not have any clay at all. I say that after reading this and other lawn forums for 14 years.

Most people who have clay-like symptoms (mucky when wet; hard and hydrophobic when dry) have an imbalance of salts (sodium, magnesium, calcium, and potassium). Excess magnesium is quite often the problem. This is where you need a good soil test to discover what you have. Logan Labs $25 test is what you need. Post the results in a new thread here and Ridgerunner should be along soon enough to help you understand what to do.

In the mean time using organic fertilizer is helpful. Another product you can use to soften hard soil is shampoo. Any clear shampoo will work. I use generic baby shampoo, but you can pick one you like the smell of. Apply with a hose end sprayer at a rate of 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. Follow that up with 1/2 to 1 inch of water to get it to penetrate deep into the soil. If the water starts to run off, stop watering and give it 15-30 minutes to soak in. Then pick up the watering. You might have to stop and start several times to get the 1/2 inch +. Give that 3 full weeks and after that when you water, the water should soak in much better. Also after you water or it rains the soil should become very soft to walk on. It will firm up and get hard again in a few days before you water.

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.

Thanks.

I've done jar and soil tests before, however it would have been from both layers. I forgot I even did that until I saw the chart and it reminded me.

I'll get fresh tests done and report back in a new thread so I have up to date info.

Do you know which of the 12 types of soil your contractor may have put in there? Here in Alabama we have mostly Ultisol, a clay red with rust, acidic, lacking Ca,Mg,(we use dolomite to correct) also lacking K and S ( so we correct with Epsom Salts and Potassium Sulphate) and you are having something along those lines. One thing we have here is that besides packing densely and stopping oxygen, the ultisol has a nasty habit of Al toxicity, which prevents roots from spreading and is hell on tuber type crops like spuds. The dolomitic lime corrects this, but it takes a lot of lime.

That area of Michigan seems to have wonderful lawns. I don't think "clay" soil is the problem. Your grass looks really unhealthy and lacking vigor. I don't know what you have going on there but I would reassess everything you are doing and also soil test just to make sure you're not missing something. Also, I don't know how careful you are about pre-emergent application but using it on new sod or a newly seeded lawn can be tricky--easy to overapply and it certainly might look like that.

The sod was established for a couple of years before I started using a preemergent.

I pulled soil samples last night and will start the jar test today so we know for sure what I have.

I did a full soil test two years ago and I don't think I was lacking any nutrients. I am ordering a new test today. I usually use the Michigan State University extension office. Any reason to use Logan Labs instead?

The city I'm in was basically a swamp and for a while a cranberry bog. Everyone in the city has problems with standing water. On my property I have amazing soil at at one end, then there was very sandy soil but was filled over with several feet of this clay like soil.

Anyway, I'm gathering the data we need and will report back soon.

I track exactly what chemicals and fertilizers I put down, when, and how much, so I'll report that with the other data.

I cannot say this link is the exact soil, spodosol, but the information can be useful. This one is found in Northern MI and there is a transition to other types as you go south. Pay attention to the fact that the contractor used fill dirt, not more expensive top soil, and associate the idea expressed in the link with the horizon or stratification discriptions, The soil can be very different as you go deeper, and a fill soil pit or hill being leveled annd hauled off might well have characteristics of those deeper layers rather that the local top layers. Google soil taxonomy maps for more links in your search. I guess my point is that over a period of years a soil will revert to its origins via leaching. But what did you start with?

http://geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/spodosols.html

Sounds like you need some milorganite..Ive been reading the reviews on home depot.com and lowes and people had yards like yours and then used milorganite and thier yards transformed.Lots of before and after pics if you want to go read it yourself.I am gonna try it this season

@Randy Man

LOL. His original post says he's been using Milorganite for the past two years. But you might be on to something, his yard definitely got transformed.

Oh ok .Sorry should have read his whole post.I just looked at the pics lol

:) yeah. I started using it two years ago. The part of the lawn that didn't have the fill brought in is doing great with it, though.

Here is the heavy metals in one of the 4 milorganite products.

http://agr.wa.gov/pestfert/fertilizers/FertDB/prodinfo.aspx?pname=1682

Relative to all the other fertilizers, here is a 72 page report updated March 1, 2017, listing the heavies from all the fertilizers allowed to be sold in the State of Washington. Scroll down, Milo is in the M section.

http://agr.wa.gov/PestFert/Fertilizers/docs/rptFertHMWebCurrent.pdf

trickyputt, are those levels of the heavy metals outside of what would be considered acceptable?

Depends on who is doing the accepting. The EPA exceptional quality rating is advertised as a good thing by milorganite. For me, its a bit of a hypothesis I cannot disprove at this time, or hopefully ever. And its about money, so being a man of modern times I have to ask what the EPA is missing. I need to understand more about natural metals I guess. One way I do that is place the behavior of these resellers of waste into a broad context and see if the behavior they exhibit seems odd. In this case of the 72 page report, some ferts most definitely have high numbers. But when filtered, Zinc amendments having high levels of zinc is, well, what did you expect?

Plants have grown into existence using metals. Red clay is red because of Iron and Oxygen. The real inclusive question that I have not yet answered for myself is what exposure does nature give me here, and how do these levels compare a fertilizer at say .5 lb-2 lb/ 1000sf / year, and include accumulation in the answer. I got kinda excited and a little freaked when I realized a pathway exists to reroute commercial wastes into fertilizers as carriers and so forth; It is a great idea socially but for adults only. I personally cannot stomach the writings of extremist California thinkers like Mike Schaffer who wave the purity flag for political money and have a all or nothing approach to toxicity. I read that often, as you ask, toxicity is a simple matter of quantity. Finding reasonable published academic sources that do not have to use parenthesis to explain their own words has been my muse lately. I would rather read Bryant Redhawk. I would even propose that trace metals needed by plant and other life are perhaps like a flu shot where a little bit innoculates? Thats a different view. But millenia ago who knows what plants had to do to adapt. I am still learning about your question.

Here's another tidbit of information :

http://www.milorganite.com/application/files/1814/7267/4175/Uptake_Triclosan_2013.pdf

It's anti-fungal too! You can't help but wonder, what else is in there.

Tell you what, I wouldn't put this stuff anywhere near my food crops.

But at 85% organic matter going down 5lbs per 100sf it sure is tempting on my red clay.

How do you figure 5lbs per 100 sq ft? Is that per year? A 36lbs bag is labelled for 2500 sq ft, so that would be 1.44 lbs per 100 sq ft per app.

I'm not a big believer in the ability to improve soils by applying organic matter on the surface. 100 sq ft of clay at 6" depth is 50 cubic feet of dirt weighing in at ~5,000 lbs. It would take hundreds of pounds of Milorganite per 100 sq feet to raise OM by 1% as most of the carbon is lost as CO2.

I read it or a number like it in the 4 page report you posted. Usually those are Annual pounds though, so divide into what and the Dr is making your point. And the secret to milo is the organic matter. Its dead bacteria, of course. At this point, and for the OM purpose on my Ultisol clay, molasses to feed the bugs has had the most demonstrable long term effect given a little om for their dining pleasure to start... I call it my steel shaft test. I run around putting my steel shaft into things. The deeper it goes, the better I like it. Stumps, lawn, garden, hard turns to soft with something for the bugs to eat.

j4 said, I'm not a big believer in the ability to improve soils by applying
organic matter on the surface. 100 sq ft of clay at 6" depth is 50 cubic
feet of dirt weighing in at ~5,000 lbs. It would take hundreds of
pounds of Milorganite per 100 sq feet to raise OM by 1% as most of the
carbon is lost as CO2.

I agree that you cannot pile enough OM at the surface to affect the soil. What you do when applying organic fertilizer is to feed the microbes at the surface. Those microbes have waste products which wash into the soil. Those waste products are picked up by underground microbes. All in all there are over 100,000 species of bacteria, fungi, microarthropods, and other microbes working in the soil. I do not believe any of those are measured when soil is analyzed. I believe they look at macro level organics like roots and sticks.

Roots. That is what you're looking for to improve your soil OM. Growing grass does that, so grow grass. Both chemical fertilizer and organic fertilizer will help you grow roots. I prefer organics.

Roots. That is what you're looking for to improve your soil OM.

100% in agreement.

100% in agreement.

As we always are. Bwahahahahahahahaha.