Thank you both -- this is great information!! Yes, the tiny landscaper is a bit inexperienced. But I bet she'll enjoy helping us drag around a chain link fence. I wouldn't have thought of doing it without a machine, but that sounds much more efficient than the hand rake alone. We'll most certainly try it. Grass1950, I hadn't really given topsoil much thought. We don't want the lawn level to be any higher anyway, even after it settles, so would compost right before seeding be a good idea (banking on the idea that it would disappear soon)? Or would you stick with fertilizer? We do want to stay mainly organic (again, see the tiny lanscaper). There are wheel marks all over the place, yes. The contractor came back and filled in one huge set that was about 4" deep (where he parked the truck full of gravel, before taking the gravel out with a wheelbarrow) but we'll leave the rest to figure itself out. The French drain went in, along with a couple of buried and redirected gutter downspouts, at the recommendation of our home inspector and 2 contractors. (OK, right, the home inspector technically doesn't recommend work, but he pointedly recommended that we get someone who does French drains in to look at it and make a recommendation.) Our neighborhood is a vast gentle hill, perched atop bedrock with plenty of rain. The yard was really squishy and there was persistent water in the crawl space. It does seem that French drains are overprescribed, but this problem was about groundwater and not surface water, so I hope adding it along the back of the yard (nowhere near the house) with a spout at the base of the hill, along with diverting the gutter pipes away from the house, redoing the crawl space vapor barrier, and putting in a better sump pump will dry out the soil and keep the foundation dryer than it was. Hope that's not TOO too much detail :) Honestly, though, if the drain was a mistake -- well, I'm not ready to learn from that mistake yet. Give it a year to settle in and then I'll be delighted to learn about the parts we messed up. Again, your ideas are super helpful. I will absolutely keep scouring the forum as we go about raking and seeding and watering our turf type tall fescue!

hi. I understand. I just retired at 57 and am really enjoying my basic yard in an average subdivision in Vancouver wa. kids are grown. when one of them made me a grandpa I let them rent my home and after living in a studio rental for a year ive moved back home and bought a huge rv and have it plumbed and wired and in back "yard". i used to really enjoy lawn and garden but lost all interest about 7 years ago and everything went to hell. haha so i have entire front lawn, much to the amusement of my neighbors grass free and am loving growing annuals, veggies and flowers. now i am almost to the point of planting 2000 feet in lawn in back and next spring will garden in the area not in lawn back there too. how old your kids? do they get to go to school where you wanted? i hope i didn't come across wrong and apparently i didn't but man you got lots of work no matter what you do don't you? lol. i used to love yard work so much that in addition to working at port of Vancouver for 35 years, i bought a lawn aerator and did yard work for others on the side. probably didn't make a nickel looking back on it. i bring that up because i never used a verticutter (?) as you said you might to reseed. i always wonders how they worked. when someone wanted a complete lawn makeover , and they were never as huge as yours is, i always rounded their lawn up, thatched, aerated and then reseeded and top-dressed with some grass mulch stuff they sell in bales around here. its a by product of the huge Oregon grassed industry and is seed free and i wither dispersed by hand or rented a caged roller thing that worked great for that. im really interested in what you do. so when you get a minute down the road email me and send pics if you like. im keith dahl kgd1956@gmail.com thanks for getting back. oh by the way, here we are having one of the driest July's on record. no measurable rain since June, with no end in sight. im a heat wimp anymore so i get my stuff done in the morning and enjoy the AC in the RV as i please. life's good. im divorced so i don't have a "honey do" list. my neighbor dude says i have a "homie-do" list haha pic of grand daughter sleeping on me. im pretty crazy about her. :-)

"I'm not sure I agree with the idea that the lawn MUST be re-seeded, unless the OP has decided he wants a KBG lawn. The Perennial Rye that was in the original mixture will eventually predominate over the KBG, so he will end up with a mostly PRG lawn. Some people do go that route. Not sure what the recommendation is for upstate NY." The perennial rye cultivars in that mix do not spread. Any bare areas now will be bare in the fall unless some of the KBG made it and starts to spread. I said anything that survives into the fall should do well, but how much grass is left at the end of August is anyone's guess. There is nothing wrong with a PR lawn, they look great, and are easy to overseed if need be. Upstate NY is KBG country, and if it gets too cold PR can die off due to cold kill, but I have read this isn't as much as an issue as once believed. I happen to think monospecies lawns are easier to start and take care of regardless of what type you pick. My whole point is this; 2500 square feet isn't a lot of area to seed again. Most of the work has been done. Instead of having a weed filled patchy lawn, kill everything and do it over. The grass will do much better, the weed pressure will be minimal, and the lawn will be very consistent and thick into the winter.

Yes, read Kimmsr's link to the Soil Food Web Primer. That was the first comprehensive explanation of how soil really works. Before that it was only speculation about the soil microbes. Until the 1990s only a dozen could be grown in the laboratories. Then DNA testing showed there were tens of thousands of microbes. Later DNA testing shows 100,000 species of microbes. The microbes we're talking about are bacteria, fungi, microarthropods (teensy insects), and protozoa. Normally in Nature, plants and animals die on the surface of the soil. The surface of the soil is filled with microbes which only decompose stuff that falls on the surface. They are specialists and do not work underground. Some of the stuff that dies on the ground washes into the soil - blood for instance. Just under the surface are other microbe species that handle this specialty. Furthermore, the upper level species do biological things analogous to peeing, pooping, sweating, shedding, spitting, etc. There are other specialist microbes which decompose the byproducts of other biological processes. There are still other specialist microbes which process the biological byproducts of the byproduct specialists. The food chain in the soil is so complicated it is referred to as the Soil Food Web. The key to starting the process going is to supply real food to the surface of the soil, not buried under the surface. Somewhere in that food web a product is produced which is plant food. It takes about 3 full weeks from the time you apply fertilizer to the surface for the plant food microbes to have produced enough. Then the grass greens up and becomes dense. Most of us do not care to slaughter animals and spread their remains over the surface of the soil, so we opt for ground up grains. Corn (sort of popular), wheat (hardly popular at all), alfalfa (very popular), soybean meal (very popular), cottonseed meal (not very popular), and any other ground up nut, bean, or seed containing protein makes a good fertilizer for the soil microbes. Even used coffee grounds make a fertilizer. You can get them in gold, 30-pound bags at Starbucks. Regarding livestock rotation: there is a different school of thought that is taking hold in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and in parts of Mexico and elsewhere around the world. Rather than two, three, or four pastures, farmers and ranchers are going with 15 to 30 different pastures. Animals are let in only after the grass has fully matured. That might mean gone fully to seed. Grass gone to seed has traditionally been thought of as inedible, but when the animals come in hungry, it disappears. Depending on how fast the rest of the pastures are growing the animals might be left in one pasture until the grass is gone. If the grass is growing fast, they will be pulled when the next pasture is ready. When you have 15 to 30 pastures to choose from, it can be complicated. The idea is to keep the animals completely off the pastures while the forage is regrowing. The rest of this program suggests you only put into the system what benefits the biology of the system. One thing that is recognized as harmful to the system is deworming medicines. Ivermec is the main name brand but there are others. Dewormers are poisonous to dung beetles. If farmers would stick to treating only the wormy animals, then it might not affect large population of dung beetles. But farmers are being told to prevent worms by treating all the animals every month - thus increasing the sales of dewormers. Once you go to routine monthly injections, all the dung beetles will die out. When you stop with the deworming, some of the animals go to the slaughter house early because they have parasites, but not all get them. Once you have culled the herd of all the parasite prone animals, you have better genetics and will continue to breed healthier animals. Also once you stop with the dewormers, the dung beetles return. One Central Texas rancher reported seeing the early morning sky black with clouds of dung beetles flying in. Another one has documented the speed with which his manure is processed by the beetles. He took pictures from the time the cow's tail went up until the manure pat was gone. He used an irrigation flag to locate the pat. The total time it took until there was nothing but a wet spot was 24 hours. And he has noticed that when his animals leave one pasture to move into another, 24 hours later there are no piles of manure to be found. Where does the manure go? If you're still reading you know the answer. It gets buried by the dung beetles. Those beetles dig a hole up to 3/4 inch across and 6 to 10 feet deep. When it rains, and even when it pours for days on end, these ranchers report they have zero erosion and no runoff. While neighboring ranches spend tens of thousands to rebuild their washed out roads, the ranches with the dung beetles don't have those costs. So they don't have the cost of the dewormer meds; don't have to buy the manure shredders and spreaders; don't have to pay to house, insure, and repair that equipment; and don't have to repair their roads from the weather. In addition they don't have to irrigate their pastures because several feet of rain can be captured in the dung beetle holes during one thunderstorm. If you had several hundred beetle holes per square yard, you could dump 4 inches per hour on that and not see runoff. How long can you sustain this approach to rotation? One rancher I talked to has been doing it for 20 years. He has the cost of his animals down to about $15 per animal because he no longer buys seed, fertilizer, medicine, herbicide, insecticide, dewormers, hormones, or supplemental feed. Even in Texas with the periodic droughts we've had, he has been increasing his stocking density until he's running about double what his neighbors are doing. Their expenses keep climbing and his keep going down. Their land keeps deteriorating and his keeps improving. The last thing he got rid of was cowboys. Rather than having a 3,000 acre ranch, he has pastures that are only 50 acres. With 300 cow/calf pairs on 50 acres, when the grass is gone, the mamas have learned to line up to move into the next pasture. There is no need for a round up because all the animals are lined up right in front of you.