Yes it is cause for celebration when we drop down to the low 90s...in late October. The big thing you have going for you in Sacramento is the unfettered sea breeze. The fact that you were able to do it once and have it look that nice says it can be done...unless that was right after you seeded. New seed is pretty resilient until the heat kicks in. Bermuda is like a predator and will continue to invade. There is simply no getting around that. If you can kill it, please report back with specifics. I forgot to respond to your watering plan for this year. I would not rely on soil moisture sensors. They may be better than I think, but what really works is visually inspecting the grass. When the grass looks wilty, it needs water. I have been doing an experiment in my lawn since Oct of 2011. That is when I stopped mowing. The idea is to see how long it can go without water. This lawn is on the edge of the Texas desert where temps run just over/under 100 degrees for several months. There is still one shady spot in my lawn where I have not provided supplemental water for 16 months. I'm not sure how deep the roots go there, but the surface soil has to be dry as a bone. Still the grass looks pretty good (for 30-inch tall grass). The point is you need to watch the grass, not the soil. Deep watering and tall grass promotes deep rooting. Deep roots can draw moisture from deeper in the soil for a longer time. Thus deep watering on an infrequent basis is the mantra.

maidinmontana said, Can someone please tell me if there is a forum where someone can go to get some ADVISE on lawn care, and in the meantime those of you who want to argue can take it elsewhere, you aren't offering any help/advise to those who post here. (Notice the original poster hasn't been back) Sorry maidin but there is no Arguing About Lawns Forum. When people want to discuss this stuff, this is where they take it. It happens in all forums. Other places to not look if you don't like arguing are the food and plumbing forums! One of the things you learn in public forums is how to filter out the stuff that doesn't matter. It takes some time to learn that. The OP's questions were answered in a day or two. Now the forum is open to the nuances of climatology flavored with beer, other Internet sites, and TV images of the Master's Tournament. Actually I was learning a bit about bermuda - that is until texas-weed left to avoid getting tangled in the rope. Personally I don't care about the micro idiosyncrasies of Atlanta's climate/lot size versus Dallas or anywhere else, but if y'all can relate that topic to growing grass, then go for it. This thread has reminded me of just a few short years ago when Tif 419 was The Holy Grail of hybrid bermuda grass. It also reminded me of the just a few short years ago when any kind of bermuda was the Anti Christ. Oh, wait a minute, it still is. It also reminded me of all the 'discussions' I participated in defending organic lawn care before the Organic Lawn Care forum was started. [sigh] Good times [/sigh] For the record, I have never learned anything listening to myself. I learned 90% of what I know about lawn care from listening to discussions just like this one. I know this is snippy, maidin, but I can't resist. Maybe I could ADVICE you on a spell checker. For those of you who are counting my messages, I don't want to disappoint you: deeply and infrequently!

There is an organic lawn care forum on Gardenweb. It's been around for years. Nobody asked for it, but when iVillage took over this website, they created it. But back in the day there had been some serious fire fights over organics. I'm sure that led to the separation and the new organic lawn forum. I have never been thrilled with the organic lawn forum here. Interestingly I have been asked to be the moderator for three other lawn care forum websites. Still most of my participation recently has been here. On one of those other websites, morph became the guy who answered anyone's question about organics. I learned a lot from him, so he's a very good resource for any website, in my opinion. The organic lawn care forum here is 100% dedicated to organic solutions to lawn care issues. On that forum if you suggest using RoundUp to quickly cure a problem that might otherwise linger for years, you will incur the wrath and ridicule of the regulars. Sometimes staunch adherence to an organic solution for everything can make organics seem like it doesn't work. You have picked up on my preference for organic solutions when and where they are possible and most practical. But I am flexible enough to allow for some use of chemicals when they are expedient to the issue at hand. My preference is always for an organic solution. I stopped fertilizing with chemicals in 2002. Do I still use chemicals for other things? Seldom but it has happened. If you have a snail problem in your yard, there is nothing safer or faster than ammonium sulfate. It is a fertilizer that looks and acts like rock salt. The snails cannot move across it without killing themselves. It literally works overnight to wipe out any sized population of snails or slugs. It also acidifies the soil to an extent, fertilizes to an extent, and acts as a chemical fungicide to an extent. It also stinks up the garage until you get rid of it. You can buy a lifetime supply for under $10, so if I had snails, I'd pull that chemical in for a one-time use. I have St Augustine grass which can become thin for many reasons. When it does, there are opportunistic plants like bermuda grass and horse herb which will move in quickly. The typical broadleaf weed control, Weed-B-Gone, will also kill St Augustine. The only weed killer that works on St Aug is atrazine, a powerful and persistent, pre and post emergent weed killer and a known health risk for fetuses. I tried it a few years ago spot spraying only the spots with weeds. You're only allowed to use it once per year, but it flat wipes out everything but the St Augustine. If you apply it in April that gives you a full season to get the St Aug back to a dense turf which resists weeds. With the repeated and prolonged application of chemical fertilizers, your soil microbiology can become disrupted. Normally the soil has 100,000 or so interrelated species of bacteria, fungi, microarthropods, yeast, protozoa, and one other class I can never remember. If you apply an insecticide, you disrupt the balance of microarthropods. If you apply a fungicide, you disrupt the balance of beneficial fungi. If you apply something with antibacterial properties (alcohol, dish washing soap, bleach, etc.), then you disrupt the population of bacteria and fungi. When you disrupt an entire class of creatures from a food chain, then no good things happen. When you apply chemicals for a long time with no periodic application of organics, you can get into what we have called a see-saw effect. The grass can look great but quickly deplete the chemical ferts in the soil. Then it crashes and looks horrible even though you just applied fertilizer. If you apply a stronger dose of chemical fertilizer, sometimes it will recover and look better than before and sometimes that kills the entire lawn. If you had a healthy soil microbiology, those critters would pull up the slack and help out. But if something is wrong and the the microbes are not all well fed, then there is no cavalry coming to the rescue. For that reason, if you are on a full chemical program, for example the Bermuda Bible program, I always ask people to apply something organic at least once a year. I'm not going to insist - what would be the point of that? But I do try to explain why you might want to use one app of organics. As for the cost of organics, the cost went waaaaaay down when I wrote the Organic Lawn Care FAQ. Prior to the 1990s the only organic materials were compost and manure. Animal dung manure was the historical garden and farm fertilizer. Rodale changed that to composted manure in the 1930s. Supply and demand drove the cost of compost through the roof. Manure stunk badly and was "hot" with immediately available nitrogen. Many people killed their lawns with hot manure. And it stinks, so there's that, too. Compost is just plain expensive. And most people could not figure out the amount to apply. The amount to apply based on the NPK is about 1 cubic yard per 1,000 square feet or 700 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Most people misjudged that horribly and applied as much as 4 or 5 cubic yards (2,400 to 3,500 pounds) per 1,000 square feet. They completely smothered their lawns. They killed it with kindness. I still see lawns smothered in my neighborhood. Then in 2002 I had read Dr Elaine Ingham's article on soil biology on the USDA website. I visited my local feed store and started reading labels. I noticed that the ingredients in organic fertilizer were the same ingredients as in dry dog and cat food with very few exceptions. I checked the prices for those raw ingredients and noticed I could save about 80% off the cost of commercially bagged organic fertilizer if I bought the raw ingredients in plain brown bags. So before I even spent any money on a bag of corn meal I went home and scattered some dog food on the lawn. Three weeks later the test area was greening up and becoming more dense. After that I started buying 3-dollar bags of corn meal (50 pounds for $3 seems crazy today). It worked but not as well as I had hoped. But based on Dr Ingham's work and what I found at the feed store, and the results I got, then I wrote the Organic Lawn Care FAQ. As it turns out I was simply not using enough corn meal to make it work. I've learned that since. The Organic Lawn Care FAQ changed everything. No longer did you have to endure stinky manure. No longer did you have to spend an arm and a leg for compost. No longer were you likely to smother the lawn under those two materials. And no longer did you have to spend an arm or a leg to buy commercially bagged organic fertilizer. I posted the Organic Lawn Care FAQ on the three forums I moderated and posted it here in the Organic Gardening forum. It has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times (according to download counters). I have learned a lot since writing it so it should be revised, but it serves as a good place to get oriented and a head start with organic lawn care. Sometimes the organic solution to a problem works better than a chemical solution. Caterpillars, for example, can be stopped from feeding instantly by one drop of bacillus thuringiensis (BT for short). It is a bacterial disease that only affects caterpillars. It causes immediate lockjaw in them, and they stop feeding. After about 3 days of not moving or feeding, they are dead if they have not been picked over by the birds. But if you use a chemical solutions to caterpillars, those affect all the insects in the soil and above resulting in a recovery period which can take months. Two other organic materials, spinosad and beneficial nematodes, also introduce paralyzing diseases to insects, but those are not as targeted as BT. They work on contact, so the insect does not have to eat anything. As for fungal disease problems in lawns, corn meal is the organic solution. It works better for some than for others, but it has worked year after year for me since 2002. The major problem with disease is that it happens in the summer. When you look at the label of the chemical fungicides it tells you not to apply if the temp is going to be 90 degrees F. Well, they really mean 85 degrees F, because if you use it above 85 degrees, you will kill the grass. All grasses. But if you use corn meal, you can use that at any temperature. Corn meal is obviously an organic solution which requires a healthy population of soil microbes. As the corn meal decomposes, a predator fungus becomes attached to it. That predatory fungus will feed on the disease fungus and wipe it out. So your only choice for killing disease in the summer is corn meal. If you live in the south, it's still above 85 every day down here. The window for using chemical fungicides in the south is very small. But having said alllll that, from reading three lawn care forums for 12 years, the primary cause of lawn issues is improper watering. Second is mowing. Fertilizer and all these chemicals are a distant 3rd place. Morph might argue persuasively that getting your soil chemically balanced for micronutrients should come in there at a high level, because that sets up a proper home for all this biology I've been talking about. Watering, mowing, and micronutrient balancing are independent of which kind of fertilizer you use. You have to water and mow anyway, so you may as well do it correctly. Most people who take advice on those topics from their lawn mower salesman or the sprinkler installer get bad information. Watering should be done deeply and infrequently. Mowing should almost always be high (with the exception of bermuda, centipede, and creeping bentgrass (and the further exception of Marathon II and III dwarf fescues)).

That is a wonderful essay. Thanks for posting, You don't have to be old to find this useful. These are all excellent ideas, many of which I've used - though I'm not quite at the point of hiring people to clean my beds. But then I have some teenagers.