I have several thoughts. Once per week watering is enough, especially for seeded bermuda. I don't have an automatic system so I got this programmable hose timer by Orbit on Amazon. From that I ran two hoses with oscillator sprinklers. If you're getting runoff and erosion there could be several issues. What kind of sprinkler are you using? If it is applying water too fast, then change the heads to low flow heads. A friend in Phoenix ended up with heads that shoot a single stream of water with almost no mist to finally get his water output down. The other issue could be your soil is not accepting the water (hydrophobic). You can fix this with (believe it or not) baby shampoo. Apply at a rate of 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. Follow that up with 1 full inch of water as measured by empty cat food or tuna cans placed around the yard. Then a week later repeat the water only. A week after that repeat the shampoo and water. That should set your soil up to accept all the moisture you give it. When you say you hit rock, does that mean solid rock or does that mean rocks which could be separated with a breaker bar and cleared out with a shovel? If you are on top of a giant rock, that's one thing. If you are on top of anything else, then the water will at least flow between the rocks. If you are on a slope, could you bring in enough soil to make the slope less steep and build a retaining wall at the bottom to keep it from washing away? It still needs to slope away from the house but only at a rate of 6 inches down per 10 feet away. You're in San Antonio. Our topsoil is mostly white, crushed, limestone, but it works well for St Augustine and bermuda. Is there a reason you're going with seed versus sod? Bermuda sod is almost always TIF 419. It is a much nicer variety of bermuda than any seeded variety. How many square feet are you talking about? If it is 5,000 square feet or less, I would seriously consider renovating with sod. Bigger than that and sod gets very expensive. You're not doing your bermuda seed right. First of all, wait until at least mid May for best results. Bermuda seed wants to be on TOP OF hot soil. DO NOT BURY IT. Scatter it on top of the bare soil and either roll it down or walk on every square inch of it. That presses the seed onto the soil so the soil will help keep the seed moist for germination. Then water very lightly 3x per day for a couple weeks until you have 80% germination. Then cut the watering to once per day for a week. Then cut the watering to every other day but go up on the time. You want the roots to start going deeper into the soil to get the water. After a week of that cut the watering to every 4 days and water a little longer. By this time you should know how long your sprinklers have to run to get a full inch. There is never any reason to exceed that amount. Eventually for the summer you will be watering one inch once per week. Seed with a mixture of Yukon, Riviera, and Princess 77 at a rate of 3 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Best place to get seed happens to be in San Antonio. Douglass King Seed is not close to you. It is inside Loop 410 where I-10 EAST meets it going toward Houston. They are closed on weekends but their website is open at dkseeds.com. Here are the general guidelines for bermuda as reinterpreted from The Bermuda Bible Every month during the growing season Fertilize with a high N fertilizer Every week during the growing season Water a full inch, all at one time Mulch mow 2x at about 2 inches high For your shady areas, the only grasses which will grow are St Augustine and Shadow Turf (a variety of fine bladed zoysia). Shadow Turf comes in plugs and can seem expensive. It spreads relatively fast and look nice, but it's still zoysia. If it gets any problems during the growing season, it will not recover until the following April. St Augustine has the issue of needing opposite care from bermuda. St Aug needs to be mowed at the highest setting and not fertilized nearly as much as bermuda. It also will spread out into the bermuda and thin it out. Would you consider mulch or flower beds in the shade? This is where landscapers can be a big help to you. A good one near you is Milbergers on Loop 1604 east of 281 at Bulverde Rd just inside the loop. They're not big on organics there but they have plants and sod - and they're close to you.

Merrybookwoyrm (love the name) To be effective, glyphosate has to be applied to an actively growing plant with a reasonable amount of foliage. And it has to be applied with a spray that is heavy enough to wet that foliage. Most failures are due to removing the top foliage (mowing or weed-whacker) and then trying to "kill the rest", or to applying to water-stressed plants in the mistaken belief that they will be more susceptible. Whatever you are trying to kill off, water it thoroughly to get it growing, spray carefully, wait a couple of days for the glyphosate to translocate to the roots ... and THEN mow or weedwhack or whatever. It improves your kill rate.

Did you ever think about creeping Phlox or that type of groundcover? Creeping phlox grows like crazy and fills in quickly. It also comes in so many different colored blooms! Even types of creeping Thyme could work well. My mother had thyme all over an embankment and it spread like crazy. Both of those plants don't have deep root systems and sort of float on top of the ground, they do not climb at all. Lilies and irises will work well, once they fill in. I have a section of embankment that I'm trying to cover with daylilies, but they still need mulch around them since they are just not filling in fast enough. Now my old fasioned ditch lilies have filled in tremendously, although they do get really tall. Lilies do need cut back at some point. Perriwinkle is a good groundcover too. My parents had that everywhere when I was a kid. It does not climb and can grow just about anywhere. If you ever need to rake dead leaves out of it, its very tolerant to abuse and doesn't get tangled in your rake the way ivies do, and you end up pulling out as much ivy as you do fallen leaves! Research ground covers, there are so many varieties, some evergreen shrub types and some are herbs, like thyme or lambs ear. I'm sure that you'll fine something to suit your situation.

Landscape fabric doesn't do any of the things it claims it can/will, and eventually causes more harm than good. It will hinder desirable plants in various ways, and weeds can/will grow on top of it just fine. Putting cardboard under mulch is a much more effective method, which will smother existing weeds, then decompose (adding some nutrients to the soil,) doesn't hinder growth of desirable plants, quite the opposite. To maintain, add more mulch as the old decomposes. Once you gain control of the weeds by killing the existing ones, control is not difficult to maintain. I've been using leaves as mulch my whole life, first in OH, now in AL. Totally agree, different leaves behave differently as mulch, even within a genus. Not all oak leaves are the same. If they are totally flat, they seem to mat worse than the bigger ones with some curl to them. One general fact about any oak leaves is that they do take longer to decompose than most other leaves, mostly carbon, little nitrogen. This is much more noticeable when gardening a "new" patch of ground, recently reclaimed from lawn, or otherwise very infertile ground. Used alone in a new bed like this, they can cause some chlorosis and slow growth. Not a terrible concern if you're a long-term-goal gardener, planting shrubs and perennials. Something you'd probably want to address with some added nitrogen in the spring if using annuals, or just impatient in general. (More below.) But after a year or more, assuming you have been adding enough organic matter periodically, so that there is a decent amount of microbial life and decomposers like worms in the soil, oak leaves start decomposing much more quickly. Large amounts/percentage of walnut leaves can create problems for plants that are sensitive to juglone. If leaves aren't either walnut or especially resistant to decomposing quickly like oak, and there are worms and/or smaller life forms from the decomposition crew, a couple feet of leaves will likely disappear over the course of winter. Yes, I meant to say feet, not inches. This is how mother nature does it in the forest, nobody rakes in there, and leaves disappear. The ground ends up being dark, spongy, full of healthy and fertile humus and microbial life. The same thing can happen in even the most modestly sized garden beds. Matting and shedding water is a super way to zone cheat/push, keeping the ground temp from moderating too much, possibly preventing ground from freezing along the north/south border zones (Z6/7,) and being too soggy for marginally hardy plants regardless of the zone one is trying to push. A bit too cold + dry = possible survival. A bit too cold + wet = usually death via rotting. Should one find a mat of leaves in the spring, they can be fluffed, raked, possibly moved... and augmented with high-nitrogen sources such as grass from mower bag, kitchen scraps, anything with much more nitrogen than carbon. Leaves are only one great source of organic...