You can spray micronutrients and iron now but not fertilizer. What you have is a cool season grass struggling in the heat. Compost would not hurt but I would wait, here is why -You need to be able to overseed as the heat of August recedes. It will be patchy where it failed but some will survive. Also, if you have areas that pond in the rain, the fescue hates that and will die there. It wants a slope or better drainage.

Summer is not the time to seed cool season grasses. For SE PA, as trickyputt mentioned, wait until the summer heat breaks. That might be August or early Sept. From there on, every day until the following end of summer is a worse day to seed. New seedlings cannot handle the summer heat, as you are seeing.

Can you take a picture and post it here? It might help identify something else that might be going on. The best pictures are taken on an overcast day.

I did not realize you had a gallery on your imgur link, sorry, I was travelling at netspeed. So one thing about that grass you have going on is that it is so thick and so lucious that you are stopping airflow while having a nutrient rich and moist environment. Its a real grass salad for fungi and a lot of insects. Those roots are sensitive to fungi attack, they are so thin in diameter a little surface problem is suddenly in the middle of the plant affecting structure and it will lay over weakly and die. Cut it lower by a fair amount and it will breathe, dry and support its own weight better also. Fescue requires more cutting than you think.

Why are you using lime and gypsum? That's a curious combination. Have you had a soil test that indicated a need for lime? You shouldn't use products like lime and gypsum willy nilly. Get a soil test first so you know IF you need something and how much you need. Another consideration: do you really want grass there? If it is surrounded by trees and the tree roots are partially on top of the ground, you could damage the trees by mowing over those roots. Grass doesn't grow well in very shady areas anyway. Have you considered alternative groundcovers?

LOL dchall and becky are grass whisperers btw. Listen.

DC, the photo link is there, let me know if you cannot see the pictures anymore. As I said, this small section has already been seeded, I did this 3 weeks ago. I know the timing was poor, but I wanted to take advantage of the sun hitting the area and no ground cover of leaves that would have been there in the fall. I believed I could keep the temp of the ground down a little with watering. We were dry and somewhat cool all spring and just got pounded by hot, humid, and wet recently, so I was wrong there. I also had no idea how extensive of a problem fungi could be until I started researching it a few days ago.

I put lime down after I tested the pH of the area, it was around 5, and I put some gypsum down because the soil was a bit compacted and I read it could help break up the soil to protect against dog urine damage. I didn't put the two down at the same time, I put the gypsum down with compost after aerating. When I said there were roots coming up, I meant small roots, nothing extensive or significant. Years of soil erosion have washed away a couple inches of top soil. I figured the fine fescue and perennial rye would be the optimal grasses for the area given their tolerance for shade. The area gets sun, don't get me wrong, just not midday sun.

Anyway, thanks again for the tips.

I think what you were reading about may have been related to the calcium:magnesium ratio. When there is too much magnesium in the balance between calcium and magnesium, the soil is "tighter." For alkaline soils, gypsum will add calcium without raising pH and improve the ca:mg ratio. For acidic soil, lime adds calcium and raises pH. If your pH was 5, you need a lot of lime (the soil test should have told you how much) and you should use lime, not gypsum, to improve the ca:mg ratio.