Watering frequently is only done when you are establishing new sod or new seed. Once the roots are knit into the soil, then you back off to infrequent watering. If you revert to frequent watering, then you will have all the weed seeds germinating. Which to get, St Aug or Zoysia? Look around your neighborhood for the successful lawns and go with the flow. I can almost guarantee you they are either bermuda (in full sun) or St Aug (full sun or shady). If you can find any successful zoysia lawns, ask the owner how long they have had it and would they do it again? Ask how often they water, mow and fertilize. I think you'll have trouble finding successful zoysia in Central to South Texas. I have a patch of zoysia but I am always in fear of it. Every week I expect it to go dormant...FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON. That's a funny thing about it. Once it goes dormant for any reason, it remains dormant no matter how much water or fertilizer you apply. I find it to be a fickle grass. But then in the spring it awakens like new. Last year my zoysia was dormant from about June 2011 through February. Since I only have a small patch it doesn't get the same care as the large part of the lawn. I've seen several zoysia lawns installed in upper middle class homes. All but one of those has converted to St Augustine before the end of the first season. The other one is going on 3 years now. Last year's drought, heat, and arid winds hit them hard, and they have a lot of weeds this year. We'll see what they do. In any case I don't consider it a pretty lawn and never have. So I'm obviously trying to persuade you to go with the grass that 99% of the non-bermuda lawns use.

Austin has some pockets of really truly cr@ppy soil, and some good stuff. Soil tests are our friends. Learning about the different solutions for amendment. I have heard that some people with red death clay have brought in some composted HARDWOOD native mulch and tilled 6" in and then not done anything with it for a year and let it rot. Others have loaded on 6 inches of compost and let the bugs cary it into the dirt. Sounds almost to good to be true. I used to live on clay. Not red death but a river cut bank with round river rock in it. Everytime I was out their with a shovel, I had compost from the Natural gardener to work into it. It got to be glorious dirt. I could grow everything. I thought I was a good gardener till I moved to 30 miles west of Austin on a high limestone hill with caliche and marl with mostly not much topsoil in the area around the house.. Many natives need to have the clay worked into loam by the bunch grass roots. that have broken it down. Find native grasses that want to break down the clay. Find a way to create structure in the clay. Gypsum, expanded shale, compost . Be aware the adding sand or decomposed granite has to be done in conjunction with more than equal amounts of mulch. One has to add at least 50% sand to have the clay not go back to cement. Research research research. I live on caliche now and I created raised beds in some areas where I grow vegetables because it was easier and immediate. I recommend compost tea. Geo Growers and the Natural Gardener for soil products. If you have a recurring bug or decease problem, step back and let the soil heal itself. I had to step back from squash because of the squash bug. I am giving my whole garden a rest this year and growing green manure. The arugala, leeks, kale and chard have not heard that I am not growing anything this winter.. When it is hot, I start vegetables in pots in the shade.

[set soapbox mode on] Okay now I'm taking it personally. You can check all the sources you want, but I can assure you it becomes baffling almost immediately, especially if you spend much time reading peer reviewed university journal articles. What we have here in this and other forums is hundreds if not thousands of peers reviewing what we do and reviewing it in much less baffling terms. The text that I copy and paste is my own, so I don't need to site sources. When I came to this forum I was doing almost everything wrong. I was convinced I was fairly correct because I attended a land grant university and took classes covering this stuff. After a few heated forum battles I tried some of the things these illiterates were writing. Lo and behold they worked for me. After that I looked back at other suggestions my "opponents" were making. Some seemed counterintuitive, so I looked into the science soil biology. From that and what I had learned of human physiology in grad school, I created the Organic Lawn Care FAQ, available on the GW Organic Gardening FAQ section. I posted that FAQ on several sites. Those sites with download counters registered well over 75,000 downloads each. Nobody in the forums seemed to be arguing against my work, so I guess you could call that peer reviewed. My lawn owner peers - perhaps not your ivory tower peers. As a result of that document I was asked to moderate three new organic lawn care forums at other e-locations. Again I am calling this a reasonable review of the concepts I set forth. I consider the Organic Lawn Care FAQ the first easy to read concept document on organics since J.I Rodale popularized it in the 1950s. His compost approach was nice until we got the technology to study DNA in the soil. With testing done in the 90s and 2000s we learned that compost wasn't a be-all, end-all magic bullet. Compost is little more than a collection of microbes and microbe carcasses. It works great as a mulch. But the benefit to organics comes from feeding real food to the soil microbes. Then you'll have to read Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Biology Primer to learn how that food gets processed into plant food. While that document is not trivial reading, it is readable to us unwashed. What I try to provide is best practices for low hassle lawn care. These practices have been reviewed in other lawn forums and tuned up over the years. Yes there are ways to make it harder and more expensive, but I don't want to work that hard myself. I even copy and paste some of the things I have written, because that has a lower hassle factor than recreating it again and again. Every now and then something new happens in home owner lawn care. Two examples that come to mind are leveling and sprigging. Several years ago Dave Proud brought us an illustrated and detailed account of how he leveled his bermuda grass lawn. Before that we never discussed leveling to get rid of a bumpy surface. It was an epiphany. The lights went on and we dug into that. I got him to join another forum for lawn nuts, and the process has been used a lot. That general topic fed into the question of why lawns get bumpy. Rototilling was discussed among homeowners and professionals. Rototilling seems to be the root cause, or at least one root cause. Another fairly recent homeowner discovers is sprigging a few dollars worth of very expensive bermuda stolons onto bare soil. This process came to us from R. Simon in Australia. It seems like he developed the process and made it work. On this topic I do not know if anyone else has sprigged successfully. I spend more time in this forum where there are more beginners than I do in the other forum, so they could be sprigging all the time over there. My point is that if and when someone has a better idea about lawn care, I'm going to bring it to the forums and discuss it. Generally those ideas do not come from peer reviewed journals out of the universities. But if, for example, you want peer reviewed evidence that shampoo will soften your soil, search the journals for "Cascade Plus, golf course, core aeration." Without the quotes of course. You'll find plenty of articles on the use of a concentrated surfactant called Cascade Plus being used to replace core aeration on golf courses. Shampoo is also a concentrated surfactant. I did not invent the use of shampoo, but when I tried it, and it worked like magic for me, I was all over it. Please go ahead and look at all the sources you want. Come back with your ideas and we can talk about them. I have reasons for not top dressing, not core aerating, not rototilling, and all the other oddball stuff I suggest. You don't have to believe them or agree. You are free to present your thoughts, but what irks me is when people refuse to spend $0.50 on shampoo but they will spend $75 to rent a back breaking machine that will not work nearly as well. ...all because they read a peer reviewed journal about core aerating. [set soapbox off]

Hello Lindseed, " Now that I think of it, in desperation, I took the soap bottle after all of my seedlings went missing once again, and squirted it all in the flower bed and then watered it in. " That would be a no-no. As someone said in the link you gave, Dawn is not soap, but is a detergent. Most of the damage you have pictured is probably from the Dawn detergent overdose. You have probably seen the television commercial where a single drop of Dawn makes a dramatic difference. " Oh, and as for the experiment. Here is what's happened so far. " It's too soon to make any conclusions based on that. Has it been less than 24 hours since you made the cuts? " I just found this, and am now completely convinced it's from the dawn dish soap. Oh how I regret that. " That mega-dose of Dawn needs to be washed out of the soil. Hopefully you are due for a rainy spell. It would use a lot of your well water to try to wash it out yourself. If you over-use a well, it can run dry. During the drought of 2012 our well ran dry from overuse of it to water our gardens. It would recover somewhat in a few hours, but we had to reduce our water usage to what our water table would supply, and water just our best plants. It's OK to use Dawn as a wetting agent in your sprays, but use an eyedropper and add it a drop at a time. One drop might be enough. " Actually, not completely convinced, because it's also on the zinnias in the tire. " And, since you did not apply Dawn to the tire, that foliage problem is probably caused by Southern Blight (Sclerotium rolfsii) or Gray mold (Botrytis cinerea). The plant debris in the tire favors both fungus diseases. Notice that this seems to be more of a spreading infection than the near whole-plant distress from the Dawn. Remove as much of the loose organic material from the tire as you can and replace it with sand. A bag of children's play sand from a home store might be sufficient, or you might have some other source of sand available. If you want to spray the plants, you could use a systemic fungicide like Bayer Disease Control for Roses, Flowers, and Shrubs. Or, if you prefer a non-toxic solution, Green Cure consists of Potassium bicarbonate (an ingredient in baking powder) and a proprietary wetting agent. Green Cure is not systemic, so it needs to be reapplied after every rain and it does not protect new growth like systemics do. I have used both products with satisfactory results. ZM