Your neighbor is living on borrowed time with Trugreen. If he has the one good guy doing the job, then fine. As soon as that guy gets a better job somewhere else, they will find another minimum wage guy to take over. They can ruin a lawn much faster than they can bring one back from the dead. Why do you need fast grass? Wedding on the lawn in June? Or just to keep the dust down? If you have been trying for 5 years and getting only mediocre results, you are probably not watering right and not mowing right. No amount of fertilizer will overcome those issues. Water is best done deeply and infrequently. Deeply means 1 inch all at one time and not 1/7-inch spread out daily over the week. Deep watering develops deep roots which can tap water deeper in the soil. Infrequently means monthly in the cool months and transitioning up to weekly during the hottest heat of summer. If you have an unusually dry bout of hot weather you might go to once every 5 days. Even through all the droughts we have in San Antonio and further south, I've never had to go to a 5 day interval. The basic idea of deep infrequent watering is to get water down deep and to allow the surface of the soil to dry completely between waterings. Weeds love it when the soil surface is continually wet. But most of them cannot germinate and take root in a dry surface. If you are mowing at your mower's lowest setting you need to raise it. I dislike splitting hairs on which grass needs to be mowed at 3.275 inches versus 3.5 inches. I just have two settings - highest setting and lowest setting. If you have fescue, rye, and/or Kentucky bluegrass, aim for the highest setting. That is the most lush look you can hope for. Short grass never looks lush even for grasses which are supposed to be mowed low. Tall grass also resists weeds because of the shadow cast on the ground by the tall blades of grass. Most weeds need full sun to take root. Shading them out helps prevent them. Tall grass does not grow faster than short grass, and tall grass uses less water. With proper watering and mowing height it is possible to have no weeds without using herbicides. If you have been applying straight chemical fertilizers for years and years, I suggest taking a year off from chemicals and trying organics. I was absolutely shocked at how my yard responded when I first tried organic fertilizer. I had been applying more and more chemical stuff and getting poorer and poorer results. One app of organic and I was shocked. I thought I had poor soil. I did. The organic fertilizer cured it. I've been organic ever since (2002). Your dog pee spots are the result of poor soil being flooded with high potency liquid fertilizer. Biologically speaking the pee overwhelms the limited population of soil microbes and they shut down production of plant food to process the urine. You can quickly boost the population of microbes with a handful of ordinary table sugar scattered over each spot. Table sugar smacks the microbes and gets them back to reproducing. It takes them a week or so to reproduce back up to numbers that can help. After that your dog spots should clear up. You will have much greener and taller grass - as you already see at the edges of the pee influence. Urine, by the way, is an organic fertilizer. So there is some hint as to what you might expect to see with a more appropriate dose of a more appropriate fertilizer. My favorite organic fertilizer is alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow). Apply at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Moisten them after application to keep the birds from carrying them away. You don't have to soak them, just mist them so they have some moisture to absorb. They will swell up and burst allowing the alfalfa to fall onto the soil. The fertilizer results won't be seen for 3 full weeks, but then, all of a sudden, you'll notice your grass is much greener, taller, and more dense. You can plant seed now but expect it all to turn to crabgrass by July. Now is the time of year when crabgrass seed germinates. All it needs is daily water for a week. Oh wait! So does grass seed. So if you are trying to germinate grass seed that takes 2-3 weeks to germinate, you will be pleasantly surprised to see such good germination in only 1 week...until you realize too late that what you're getting is crabgrass. A much better time to seed is in the fall when crabgrass does not germinate. If you must have something quick and the area is small, you can try sod. Sod is more expensive but for small areas you might be able to swing it.

Also for watering: the soil looks too dry too soon currently. Mine, too--and I have no real problems. The very top surface of the soil dries out really fast in sun and wind, but that doesn't mean there isn't water underneath. You can test that by pushing a screwdriver into the soil. If it goes in fairly easily (barring rocks), your soil is damp. Or drive a small trowel into it and separate it into a V shape by rocking it a little bit. That'll give you a direct visual on how deep the water is. Here would be my plan: for now do very frequent waterings to help really wet the soil, I'm not familiar with California (except for the part about moderate temperatures and no rain), but this doesn't sound like a good idea--it encourages shallow roots and lawn diseases. The standard is 1" of water a week, all at once (well, within a day to allow for on/off cycles to allow the water to penetrate). For sandy soil your mileage will differ because the water wicks out fast and goes very deep very quickly. I will also probably try milorganite as a jump start, as I fear my soil is probably pretty depleted. I swear by it, others don't (it is processed sewage, but heated enough to kill everything in it). The 18 lbs/thousand square feet I put down last weekend kicked in and it's a rainy week. The grass, since Sunday, has grown one and a half inches and gone a deeper green. Once it stops raining, I'll mow. I went high, but I'm going to renovate this fall--with a deep, heavy core aeration I want lots of organics mixing into the holes. I alternate it with alfalfa and soy. When I started (early last year), my soil profile was slightly silty clay, poor drainage, very poor water penetration, hard as a rock, and a light tan. It had been corn field for as long as I could remember prior to building, and even my parents don't remember when it wasn't. Call it 40 years of abuse. Now it's still slightly silty clay (nothing's going to change that short of a renovation down to a foot or more). Drainage is fair to good, penetration is good to excellent, the soil is still hard when dry (it's supposed to be), but spongy when wet. The top half-inch is black, another inch is deep brown, and a good three inches below that have turned a midrange brown. Everything grows better and more strongly. I'm very pleased. Some older photos are here. I have to update them--the grass has improved since these were taken and the season advanced a bit.

The information you get from the "mud" or "jar" test is about the amount of organic matter in the soil, the stuff that floats on top of everything else since very few that do make the effort will have the idea soil, loam. Pouring "fertilizers" on a lawn simple creates more problems because that stimulates lush green, and sick, plant growth that then needs other poisons to control. "Conventional" lawn care is a vicious cycle of spending lots of money to have a sick lawn. Work at getting the necessary organic matter into the soil and have a good reliable soil test done. Here is a link that might be useful: OSU CES

@danielj_2009 and others around the stove, I got to thinking about what you said about speed of lime and particle size. Besides any physical leaching due particle size, I wondered if particle size and speed and amount of change might be the biggest influence on quantity of lime that gets recommended. The quotes you gave above refer to 25lbs for some limes but warn against exceeding bag rate for the "new fast acting" limes. Is the grind that big of a factor? I had my doubts. So I did a search to find the chemical analysis of lime products. To my disappointment, most products don't provide one. Most just say "derived from limestone." That could include a lot of different components. Finally, I found this: http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/pdfImages/41/417ecb06-d1a5-40cb-975a-78de1d1028f2.pdf PENNINGTON ® FAST ACTING™ LIME Plus AST ® GUARANTEED ANALYSIS Calcium (Ca)............................................................................................. 24% Magnesium (Mg) ...................................................................................... 6% Calcium Oxide (CaO) ............................................................................... 30% Magnesium Oxide (MgO)......................................................................... 15% Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3) ................................................................ 55% Magnesium Carbonate (MgCO3) ...........................................................30% Moisture (maximum) ................................................................................ 1% Calcium Carbonate Equivalence (CCE) .................................................... 90%* Neutralizing Value 90% Calcium Carbonate Equivalence (CCE) Derived from dolomitic limestone F525In Florida, this product requires 2000 pounds to be equal to one ton of standard liming material. That is a fair amount of calcium oxide (quick lime) and magnesium oxide. Both are extremely caustic, meaning among other things, they destroy living tissue. I know from personal experience that quick or "hot" lime will burn the heck out of your skin. I think the oxide content of the Pennington fast acting lime might help explain some of the difference in lime amount recommendations (from 6 up to 100lbs) and why the manufacture of this product advises 6-10lbs. Makes me question what the other fast acting (or other) lime products contain when the say "derived from limestone." Just another brick for the wall even if it doesn't clear things up. Update: http://www.espoma.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/LightningLimeFactSheet1.pdf http://encap.net/lawn-mineral-nutrients/fast-acting-lime/#tab-id-3 http://www.solu-cal.com/media/pdf/msds-sheets/11010%20Solu-Cal%20Calcitic%20Lime%20SDS%202015.pdf http://www.acgmaterials.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Product-Data-Sheet-MINI-PRILLED-LIMESTONE-112116.pdf http://www.jonathangreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/magicallabel.pdf http://mda.maryland.gov/plants-pests/Documents/limestones.pdf