This will likely be a very lengthy post, sorry in advance! But a few of you have asked me to keep you updated with pics, and I figure it would be better to do it all in a single thread.

History

I bought this house about 17 years ago. I have 5 acres of land, with a little over 1 acre in the center of it that's cleared off and then surrounded by 4 acres of wild woods (mostly field pine, red and white oak, maple, and beech). The house is at the top of a gentle slope.

I don't know of anyone locally that has what you would call a "manicured" lawn. Pretty much everyone says "who cares as long as it's green", and the most work they do is mowing and maybe throwing out the Lowes seed mix on bare spots.

Which is the same thing I've done, until maybe 2 years ago when I decided to really focus on my back yard; I have several flower gardens and a koi pond, so it's becoming my oasis away from work.

How it looked before

I don't really have any pictures of the lawn from before I started working on it at all, but here is my front yard. I haven't done anything with it other than mowing, so this is pretty much how the back yard looked, too.

I don't know if there's any actual grass here at all! The biggest problem is that it all dies away in the winter, so I end up with 3-5 months of mudpit :-O

What I've been doing so far

Starting a year or two ago, I began spreading corn meal gluten on the first of the month in the back yard. That's when I realized that the Lowes seed mix was mostly junk, so I ordered what I thought was a high quality tall fescue: Kentucky 31.

Since then I've learned that K31 might not have been the best choice, but... oh well.

I also ran sprinklers everywhere, including 3 pop-up impact sprinklers for the back lawn. I set them to run for 20 minutes, every other day.

Other than that, I just paid attention to the height while mowing in the hopes of choking out any weeds. Which really didn't work at all, but I'm jumping ahead :-O

I wanted to stick to organic because I had a senior dog that had special needs, and I couldn't risk him eating or inhaling anything that might hurt him. I also have a hot pepper garden nearby AND well water, and I really didn't want to risk any chemical runoff making its way to my food!

This year

This is a picture of my back yard that I took early this year (from an upstairs window). It had filled in a lot as compared to previous years, but there are still bare spots on the left (West) side.

In the bottom middle, just above the sidewalk, you can also see that the "grass" is very light green.

Around the middle of May, my senior dog took a sharp turn for the worst; on Monday morning he was running around like normal, then at around 11am he lay down and was panting very hard. By 1pm he couldn't stand and was collapsing, so I thought he was dying on the spot! The vet really ticked me off when they refused to help (long story), so my only option was to take him outside to his favorite spot in the garden, and sit with him until the end.

After 8 hours of sitting with him (and fighting off a huge black snake that wanted to check him out!), he started to recover a little. He still couldn't walk, but he was looking around. I carried him back inside and got him to drink some water and eat a little food.

The next 2 weeks were a roller coaster; one minute he was good, the next you would think he was dying, then he would recover. He could barely walk, though, so every few hours I would take him outside to see if he needed to go potty. This is when my real weed control began.

He was about 50lbs, so I would carry him from upstairs to the bare spot on the far left that you see in the above picture. Then I would lay him down, and sit beside of him for awhile to give him time to catch his breath and maybe stand up to pee. During this time, I began pulling the weeds that were around me as a type of distraction.

I also had to forego mowing, because the pollen was making it hard for him to breathe.

He passed on June 5 :'-(

By that time I had worked my way down through that light green area, discovering that it was almost entirely white clover. Not mowing had changed my whole perception of the yard; I could see what was growing tall or spreading, and it was MUCH easier to see what was weed and what wasn't!

When I got to the end of that, what I thought was grass turned out to be mostly crabgrass!! Mixed heavily with bermuda grass, which mostly dies away during the winter in my area.

I still have another dog (a 10 year old Sheltie) that plays in the back yard, so even with Bane gone I didn't want to risk chemicals hurting her. I was already halfway done (I thought!!) so I just decided to continue pulling weeds manually.

My technique was to use my handy-dandy trowel to push under the weeds about 1" deep and 5" wide, then pry with the trowel in my right hand and pull it up with my left hand, salvaging as much soil as I can while minimizing the roots or seeds.

Toss it in a 50G trash can, then when it gets full I would dump it in the bed of my old beater pickup. When the pickup got full I'd haul it off.

I did this for 1-2 hours a day, 4-6 days a week.

The last time that I spread the corn meal gluten was on August 1. It's supposed to be a pre-emergent (killing weeds before they can grow), so I wanted to give it enough time to not kill the grass seed that I was planning to sow.

I continued hand-pulling weeds until this week (the first week of October).

Today

After it was all done, here's what I had:

(Please ignore the fence; you can see that I began to rebuild the fence next to the garage, but then COVID came and I wasn't able to continue replacing panels this year)

I did my best to keep what looked like tall fescue, and removed the rest. It rained yesterday so the ground is pretty wet at this point.

I'm VERY irritated about the clover already coming back on the right side, near the sidewalk!

I suspect that I'm going to have to use chemicals here in a few years, but for now it is what it is.

This is a close up of the upper left of that picture:

There's one smallish area that I had to give up on, at the upper right of the first picture under the "Today" heading. The temperature is already lower than ideal for tall fescue, and it's supposed to rain every day for the next week! The soil here is VERY hard so it was taking a lot longer to clear, so I had to make an executive decision to just let it go and I'll deal with it next year:

Conditioning the soil

One major issue I've had is areas of heavily compacted soil. This is near the gate (upper right of the first picture under "Today"), I couldn't get the screw driver in but maybe 1/2"! That's after a lot of rain, too:

Going about 20' from the gate, though, I could go all of the way in without any real pressure:

So step one for today was to use dchall_san_antonio's suggestion of applying baby shampoo to the compacted soil. The key ingredient here is sodium laureth sulfate, and in theory it should act as a surfactant and allow greater water penetration. There's some debate on whether it really works, but I haven't read anything that it does damage, so I figure that it's worth trying.

"Sulfate" seems to be part of cancel culture, though, so finding a baby shampoo with sodium laureth sulfate became a challenge! I finally found this for $5 at Family Dollar:

I don't have a hose sprayer, so instead I mixed the whole bottle with 6 gallons of water (so a little over 1oz per gallon) and used a regular watering can to spread it over the compacted areas.

I let it sit for about 30 minutes before moving on to the next step.

Step two was to spread compost over these compacted areas, to help add nutrients back in and give the new grass seeds something to grow in. My only local source is Lowes Hardware, and I found these for $3.50 /each:

I could only fit 4 in my trunk, so I ended up spreading it pretty thin:

Immediately afterward, I sowed more K31 grass seed. I didn't bother overseeding the areas that have grass, I focused on the bare areas.

It began to rain less than 30 minutes after I finished, but it wasn't a hard rain so I really, really hope that it just helped everything to settle and didn't wash it all away :-O

I should see results in 8-21 days, so I'll update back when / if I see growth!