Check the weather for the next week. A lot of the area is going to have another week of rain that might help. A simple hose end timer and sprinkler setup is pretty cheap and will water the seed for you. Do a search for sprinklers for small lawns and you can find some examples of what I'm talking about. GrassFast and products like that which are sheets are expensive and really meant for for slopes where you don't want the seed to run off with the rain or irrigation. There are other products like paper mulches you can buy for much less. There are also specially coated seeds like Scotts new water saver stuff but none of those items will let you go a week without watering. I never heard of grass fast but I've seen pennington seed mats at home depot. As everyone else has said, fall is the best time to seed in this region but if you don't mind spending some money on seed and a sprinkler you'll need anyway you might get it to fill in a little bit but you'll probably need to do it again in the fall. It's not like we're talking about the whole lawn and hundreds of dollars worth of seed here. I'd throw some down and see what happens.

It definitely points to you removing all the hindrances to the sod putting down roots. Pea gravel, I'm not familiar with....but ask yourself, can the sod have difficulty getting through this gravel and can it receive adequate water penetration. Sod cannot grow if put ontop of present turf....there has to be soil under it to promote rooting. I would imagine any kind of gravel would make it difficult to do this and ergo, must be removed, the soil possibly improved with compost layer, then the sod replaced. I had no idea Lowes sold sod. They are not, as far as I know, turf specialists....and if this is true, why buy a soil product from a box store. There must be any number of sod providers/growers in your area that can give proper information about what type of sod does well in your area. The sod grower knows what type you have and what type you should put down....you left the job to guesswork...and you paid the piper with dead grass. Find out what type you have at present growing, then buy the appropriate sod to match. The yellowing sod does suggest you had difficulty getting proper amounts of moisture down through the soil to encourage rooting. If the sod is dead, no amount of rain is going to fix it. If the moisture, from whatever source, cant stick around to encourage roots, then the grass will yellow, go brown and die. You should not mow after laying down sod....you should wait until it has good solid rooting and is beginning to grow ---as much as 3" - 4"...before subjecting it to the mower blade. It stayed green for a time....it had some strength in it, put there by the grower....but it soon dried out from lack of moisture because it was sitting on rock. No matter how you put it, you must give the sod a foundation to grow on and put down roots.

So now I have 3 recommendations, all conflicting, and no idea where to go from here. I thought I was confused before... Not really. On the major nutrients they are very similar. Try to keep in mind a couple of turf basics. 1. Generally, 90% of the path to a healthy lawn is proper 1. watering, 2. mowing, and 3. fertilization... and a distant 4. PH. Proper fertilization means supplying the turf with macro and micro nutrients. The macro nutrients Nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium are 99% of the fertilizer equation. The micros, copper, boron, zinc, etc. are what is left and are almost never so deficient as to cause a problem. Keep your eye on the macros and don't sweat the micros. A very acceptable lawn can be had with a soil PH anywhere from the high 5s to low 8s. For turf grasses a PH between 6 and 7 is ideal. Slightly acidic soils make all nutrients more readily available as well as help inhibit many diseases. Too high a PH and there are nutrient deficiencies. Too low and soil biology is damaged. The further from the ideal that the soil PH is, the more likely that the turf will exhibit signs of poor color, health and disease. So to your concerns: All three recommendations addressed the macro nutrients of phosphorous (P) and potassium (K). (The important ones) Logan Labs recommended: Totals: 6.38#K per thousand sq ft 4.16#P per thousand sq ft Morpheuspa recommended: Total: 5#K per thousand sq ft 3#P per thousand sq ft Fertilizer Guy recommended: Totals: 31#P* 45#K* * as he evidently recommended the amount for your whole lawn, you will need to divide by the number of thousand sq ft you gave him for the size of your lawn. I'm guessing around 8-9 thousand sq ft. ( e.g. 45/9= 5#K per thousand sq ft) The differences: Logan Labs and Morpheuspa addressed some micro nutrients. As I said above, none of them are depleted in your soil and, in my opinion, addressing those are not going to make an observable difference for you or any significant affect on your turf. Nowhere as big of an impact as getting your PH into the ideal range below 7 will. Amending them wont hurt, so it's up to you. The Logan Labs agronomist punched the numbers into the formula for the ideal amounts of nutrients and gave you the raw results as total amount for each amendment. The numbers are a little scewed for incorporation. Morpheouspa has a tendency to play it safe. "Better to cut a little long than too short, you can always cut more. You can't uncut." A good practice to follow. Fertilizer Guy may be following the "cut long" philosophy with the sulfur application, otherwise, he was converting the Logan Lab recommendations into the products he stocks. Hope that helps you.

I know this is long, Heidi, but I've got personal experience with your situation. To be brief, I'm confident that this tree is not even close to death's door, and would be much better served by fixing the causes of its decline now so it can green up and be much healthier to deal with the stress of repotting next summer. In particular, your ficus was thriving until three months ago, and we know that the decline was caused by low light and poor watering, which means that fixing the root congestion and soil aren't an emergency. To be clear, gardengal is probably right that you could repot now without killing the tree, but because it would be easy to get it green again by correcting the biggest problems now, you would be best off waiting until summer to do major root work and put it in a great growing medium. Then you will be rewarded with a burst of new growth, and you'll soon be pinching growing tips and pruning to control its enthusiastic growth and tell it to fill in all those gaps left by dropped leaves. My experience: I have two smaller roughly five year old ficuses that were completely rootbound and were stuck in a dim corner. I often forgot about watering until leaves started yellowing and dropping, and the I'd fill their tall plastic 'saucers' and left the water there until they stopped soaking it up. In other words, I drowned the roots every time I watered, and maximized the amount of deadly mineral deposits in the soil. Aside from feeble attempts to maintain a few leaves, they had almost stopped growing entirely because their depleted energy reserves made them more vulnerable to attack and only allowed them to put our a few leaves at a time, and most of the buds and leaves that appeared were killed by spider mites. But these are tough plants, so they clung to life for about three years before I finally cared enough to search for answers and found these forums. I immediately started treating the mite infestation, thoroughly flushed the pots (I swear I could hear them sigh with relief), fertilized with a weak solution of Foliage Pro, which has a great ratio of basic nutrients plus all the micronutrients plants need, moved it in front of my best window, which only provides mediocre light, and added bright white (not soft white) 5000k 100W led and cfl bulbs in clamp-on fixtures. Two months later, each branch has about half a dozen new leaves, including some emerging near the stem (a sign that the tree is getting better). It's wonderful to see them getting so green, and I'm already reading up on how to prune them when they get growing again. So Heidi, if I were in your place, I'd start by checking the leaves for spider mites with a bright light and a magnifying glass (they're tiny red dots on the leaves, and you may see little bits of webs on the leaves our branches). Ask about treatment if you find any. Then I'd flush the pot (details below), fertilize with a 3:1:2 ratio fertilizer (miracle gro general purpose granules are easy to find and the right ratio), move it to the best window I had, and put two 100 or brighter led or cfl bulbs in it for 12 hours a day, using a timer. From then on, check soil moisture by pushing a sharpened 3/8" dowel all the way through to the bottom of the pot, and DO NOT WATER until the dowel comes out completely clean and dry (at that point there's still a lot of water inside the soil particles). When that happens, water until about 15% of the water exits the drain holes, let it drain, and then either tilt the pot at 45 degrees for 15-30 minutes after watering to remove excess water, or insert a wick into a drain hole and raise the pot up so the wick won't come in contact with the drained water. You can wait until the surface of the soil is dry to start checking the soil moisture, but after that you should check daily until you have a feel for how long it takes for the poor to dry up. About flushing: flush with lukewarm water, using about ten times the pot's capacity, then give it a weak solution of fertilizer. Use R/O (reverse osmosis) water if possible; water from supermarket water machines are usually $.39 per gallon, and that little pot will maybe need two or three gallons to do the job. My water is hard, so I used R/O water to flush, and because my tap water is hard I use water from my cheap faucet-mounted filter for regular watering. And the reason midsummer is the best time to do something stressful is that 1) ample summer sunlight generates much more energy from the leaves than even a lot of winter sunlight can provide, and 2) the plant is programmed to put energy into new growth in summer, whereas in winter it wants to store it for use in the spring. From several people's experience, including Al (talks), who knows whereof he speaks, if you take two healthy plants and repot one now and one next June, the second will be in better shape next fall than the one you repotted a year earlier. Sorry for my rambling post, and I hope it helps at least a little.