Never ever (EVER) rototill in preparation for grass. Putting compost into the soil is counter productive. Furthermore you can never get the untilled profile of the soil under the tilled soil to be perfectly level. When the fluffy soil on top finally settles in three years, it will settle and leave it bumpy. The best organic material for soil is grass roots. Grass sheds about 1/3 of its roots every year and regrows new ones. Those old roots decompose and become the organic matter you want. New grass will do fine on your current soil. Why did the grass die? Did you father water it regularly (weekly in the summer heat)? St Augustine will only die if it is not watered. If you have any St Aug left, it can be reclaimed by proper selective watering and fertilizing. I have a spot in my back yard that was allowed to dry/die out. It was 100% bermuda 3 years ago. Today it finally looks like St Augustine again. St Aug will send runners out 5 feet every spring and 5 feet every fall if you water and fertilize. If you can live with that then you can reclaim the St Aug with no cost. Turffalo is an incredible grass if it is in full sun. It will thin out and leave completely bare spots in the shade. By shade I mean any tree or shrub or statue or whatever that casts a shadow on the grass will thin it out.

Well, after some more research, I've made some progress on identifying the weeds, and figured I'd share... I'm almost positive #1 is Virginia Buttonweed I think #2 might be nutsedge. Can someone confirm that? As far as #3 goes, I think it is bermuda grass. But I think I actually have some bermuda and crabgrass, particularly where the lawn meets the street. And now begins the long process of trying to revive my lawn. My current plan is... 1. Try to control the weeds as best I can for now by spraying them with weed control for lawns and/or picking them by hand. Already started and it seems to be slowly killing the weeds and leaving the grass intact. 2. Come early-September, I'm going to fill in some depressed areas of the lawn with topsoil 3. Top dress the rest of the lawn with a thin layer of top soil. 4. Add some milorganite (unless someone has a better suggestion) 5. Seed entire yard with tall fescue, or maybe a mix of tall fescue and kentucky bluegrass 6. Water daily until grass starts to grow, then only twice a week for a few weeks, then only once a week. 7. Pray that tons of grass grows and chokes out the weeds 8. Come early spring, spread pre-emergent herbicide on the lawn Thoughts? This post was edited by ryanhaub on Sun, Aug 4, 13 at 0:40

Start with a soil treatment that will soften your soil and allow water to penetrate much better. Your soil is not compacted - it is hard. Those are different. The treatment is to spray any clear, generic shampoo at a rate of 3 ounces (or more) per 1,000 square feet followed up by 1 inch of irrigation. Watch carefully for runoff. Stop watering immediately if you see it flowing off. The soap is supposed to stop that. If you apply the soap, water, and it still runs off, water more slowly. You still need to get an inch on but move the sprinklers and let the water that's there soak deep into the soil before watering there again. Repeat this every other week until you are happy. The expected result will be that the soil becomes very soft to walk on when it is moist. When it dries out between watering, it should become hard again. That is normal. Once you do this, you'll be helping your neighbors soften their soil. This is 100% better than any aeration. It works immediately while aeration works marginally well under the best of circumstances. Earthworms is more of a euphemism for organic matter in the soil. Worms are nice but overrated. What you really need is the beneficial fungi that earth worms feed on. Get going on that with organic fertilizers like alfalfa pellets, soybean meal, corn gluten meal, or as a last resort, corn meal. In the summer heat mow at one notch above the bottom on a rotary mower. When it starts to cool off again, then drop it all the way down. If you really want it barefoot friendly, look for a reel type mower and drop it to 1/2 inch. Contractor grade bermuda is possibly the best turf available, bar none. Why? Because it is so easy for the sod farms to grow that the price has come way down. It is much easier/faster/better for a contractor to put Tif 419 sod down than it is to seed and deal with those issues. There are sports grades of turf around which might be better than Tif 419 but you don't want those. It is never too late to apply organic fertilizer. You can use it any day of the year, rain, snow, or shine. Well, maybe not snow. You cannot over apply, as David_tx said. There is a guy on another forum who applied 50 pound per 1,000 square feet every week of the season with no ill effects. Google "Bermuda Bible" and memorize it. It was written for the chemical minded homeowner. The author comes to the regular lawn forum occasionally and is occupied on other lawn forums. He was a bermuda sod farmer for years and retired last year. At the job he was all chemicals. At home he was mostly organic. After growing bermuda both ways, the bible was written to bring the most success to the most people. David_tx has found a way to grow bermuda organically. Listen to him. Before DNA testing, compost was the only organic material anyone used. It was expensive and quite often led to huge problems in lawns. That was in the days when Rodale had control of the organic gardening movement. Since the late 1990s, the use of grain meals has taken over with spectacular results and huge cost reductions. All the issues with compost are gone. Compost has uses, but fertilizing lawns is not one of them. In fact I dare say that the only reason there is an organic lawn care forum anywhere is due to the discovery that compost was a problem and ground grains was the solution. Generally all insects prefer the more natural use of grains rather than chemicals on the soil. In a 'normal,' healthy lawn, the beneficial insects will predominate. Why? Because 'healthy' is the definition of normal. When you have the bad bugs then something is out of balance. Something is not normal. Usually applying food of some sort will straighten things out. Sometimes grains are not the fastest answer. Sometimes molasses (a food) is a faster answer. If your ants are fire ants or another type of ant that is doing damage, the fastest solution is to give them a disease (organic!). The disease is called spinosa which causes all the insect's muscles to contract resulting in paralysis until death. The product is called spinosad or Conserve (trade name). There is a bait called Green Light Fire Ant Control with Conserve. Find a trail of fire ants and drop no more than a 3-finger pinch along the trail. I use a 2-finger pinch and have some left over. Fire ants will jump on it and start carrying it to the nest. The entire nest will collapse and die within 24 hours from just a few grains of the bait. Be careful how you use it, because it is very effective on many beneficial insects (bees and wasps come to mind). Try to target your pests. There is a similar product by Fertiloam, but I can't remember the name. Look for spinosad or Conserve. What organic matter? The organic matter that matters is the beneficial fungi in the soil. The population of fungi in soil far outweighs (literally) the population of all other microbes combined. Others are bacteria, protozoa, and micro arthropods (mini insects). You can have good fungi by watering regularly, the soap stuff from above, and feeding organic fertilizer. The occasional use of chemical fertilizer will not benefit your soil but may boost plant growth for a short time. The repeated and sustained use of nothing but chemicals WILL deplete the beneficial microbes in the soil and that can be a problem.

I think it's amazing this thread went on so long with no mention of St Augustine. UC Verde and all the other buffalo and prairie grasses are for full sun. Kikuyu is one of the most invasive imported pest plants short of kudzu. The others mentioned are ground covers that do not repair themselves. Dichondra will die annually from flea beetle. They wipe it out faster than you can diagnose it, but it returns from seed. Fescue, in my opinion should be formally outlawed in CA unless you live west of the 5 in San Diego and Orange counties and west of the 405 in LA. North of the 10 it can be grown on the west slopes of the coastal range, but not in the valleys. St Augustine is a real turf grass, unlike many of the alternates mentioned. It spreads to repair itself under the dog feet, is very shade tolerant, also sun tolerant, and it will crowd out other grasses when mowed at the mower's highest setting. St Aug comes as pieces of sod on a pallet. Cost is about a dollar per piece covering about 2 square feet. It spreads 10 to 15 feet per year in all directions, so if you don't cover the entire area at one time, it will take over and cover for you. St Aug takes as much water as any turf grass if you want it to remain green. If you stop watering it for more than a month, it might die completely, so it differs from other grasses in that regard. But I have revived it from beyond the grave at my my new residence in the Texas Hill Country. St Augustine is considered to be a water hog, but that is pure myth. All grasses need 1 inch of water, once a week, in the hottest heat of summer. This goes for the cool season grasses in the north and the warm season grasses in the south. In Phoenix both bermuda and St Augustine need 1 inch every 4-5 days, but in the rest of the country it only needs it once a week. This time of year in your area you should be watering 1 inch, all at once, every 2-3 weeks. The problem with fescue is it needs water 3x per week in the summer and that dries up your aquifers and lakes. Not sure why you think you have clay, but you likely don't. I don't recall any brick factories in your area, so I'm skeptical. After 12 years of moderating three lawn forums, fewer than 10 writers really had clay. Your soil might have clay like properties, but those can be fixed. Even real clay can be fixed, but you have to have a good soil test along with a good reading of the soil test before you can fix it. 9 times out of 10 people who think they have clay have no clay at all but they do have fine silt and a salt imbalance (calcium, sodium, magnesium, and potassium). You can't know what the problem is without the chemistry test. A secondary issue causing hard soil is allowing the soil to dry completely such that the beneficial microbes in the soil are depleted and unhealthy. That can be fixed by spraying the soil with any clear shampoo at a rate of 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. Follow that with 1/2 to 1 inch of water and let it go for 3 weeks. At the same time feed the soil with an organic fertilizer like alfalfa pellets, corn meal, soybean meal, or even Milorganite. Compost and/or manure won't do the same thing as the fertilizer. The deep moisture creates a perfect environment for the microbes. The organic fertilizer feeds them. Hard soil is easy to fix. The best soil test in the US is from Logan Labs in Ohio. Yes, it's been tested against all the other labs. Get their $25 test and post the results on the Lawn Care forum and you'll get about $250 worth of free advice from people who know specifically what to apply, when, how much, how often, and where to get the stuff. If you want to see some alternate grasses in action, visit Descanso Gardens and the Huntington Library in Pasadena.