I just built a deck myself. I was also careful not to leave boards laying on the turf very long but the constant trampling was hard on it. Like you, my KBG turned yellow and laid flat. What ended up working very well for me was to take a soft rake to it to lift the grass up and then gave it a very thorough drink for a few hours with the manual sprinkler until it was squishy. You can hardly tell which grass was looking sickly now. Here's June 24th before - Here's July 1 after - Good luck.

I'm all in favor of organic material. However, actual soil is mostly inorganic material, right?-sand, clay, or loam. If you do a soil test and get back 5-10% organic, you're doing okay. That still means that 90% is inorganic mineral. If I don't add some of that to these places, when the organic matter that I have added decays I will end up with a low spot. At least that is my concern. The soil test results showed a sandy loam. I dug down about 6 inches for the test. I do realize that when you buy topsoil you can get any old garbage. However, I think the nursery I use is reputable and sells good stuff. I just bought about 15 yards of compost from them and spread it on the lawn. I believe they sell mushroom compost, left over from raising mushrooms. I think he said that the topsoil they sell is about 50% mushroom compost anyway. BTW, thanks for the discussion, guys. Liz

I'm a fan of letting nature take its course with: 1) A lot of help and 2) Trying to mimic what nature does just not at nature's speed. And I'm going to disagree back again. " Whatever woody or barky particles that may be present in compost (and you DO want them) " You don't want them if you're digging it in. If it's compost, it should be fully decayed and particles shouldn't be woody or bark-like. If they're recognizable as woody or bark-like, they're high in carbon and absolutely will suck nitrogen from any source they can get it to decay. That's going to be a problem, from very minor to very major, depending on the amount added. I've seen that too many times to count. It can be countered--and small amounts added may be unnoticeable--but grasses grown on it won't perform very well until the nitrogen balance catches up. Consider. Nature rarely adds wood directly to deep soils. She lets it rot up top and then the worms and beetles and termites drag the rotten bits down under. Often as poo. When things get buried unrotted, they sometimes don't decay...and turn into fossilized wood. Or fossils. It's rare, but that's the start of things. However, if it's fully decayed compost, smells like fresh earth, and has no recognizable bits and pieces, it can be dug into the soil--at amounts up to about five percent. With one warning---it is going to decay off to nothing within a maximum period of five years. Which means the soil is going to settle. Which means if you got everything nice and flat, it's going to drop into a divot within five years. Maximum. More if it's a nice environment. The rules change for adding stuff up top. You want to chop up wood and toss it up there? Go for it. Sawdust? Have at it, I do (I find Equine Pine pellets to be an occasional nice addition). At the air/soil interface, anything goes. The only restrictions are for things that are dug down into the soil. Some meals also work wonders at transforming soils. Cracked corn offers highly fibrous structure with modest nitrogen, and a mild anti-fungal boost to boot. It's one of the best combined boosts for feeding, soil, and protection out there. Plus I've been maintaining and improving soil structure quite beautifully just on soybean meal as the worms also rather like the stuff, reproduce quite well on it, and themselves do the work. Personally, I wouldn't rototill. It's very hard to get a flat surface after doing so without calling a professional to box-blade. I didn't when the back patio and gardens were installed and I had trucks going back and forth. I should have sprayed shampoo (or my own sodium lauryl sulfate concoction) but it was before Andy and I had developed the formula in a late-night creative chemistry session. I fed the area heavily and frequently with organic food, as well as the surrounding areas, and within two years the problem had corrected itself--worms and other critters from microbial to very macro had fixed it for me. It's completely indistinguishable from the rest of the lawn. One thing you certainly could do is rent or borrow an aerator and aerate the area several times over. Generally, it's done 2 to 3 times, but for compacted earth, I'd do it 5 to 7 times. Really tear it up. There's no reason to load food into the soil at that time or before seeding unless you want to feed any weeds that grow and losing nitrogen to the air and water. Without knowing what your soil is like or what it requires, you're blindly dumping resources, which isn't environmentally sound anyway. You could get a test through Logan Labs if you like. Then, wait for temperatures to fall off their high. For you, that's like July 7th. :-) (More like August 10th or so, just when you look out and notice in the evenings that summer is just starting to come to an end and the tree leaves are looking a bit tired). Seed at that point. Feed with a good organic feeding (I'd suggest Milorganite or Ringers or soybean meal or really, whatever you can get) then too. Search around for how to start a new lawn patch or ask at that time because everybody else will be as well, and we've gone through it a ton of times as well. :-)

" can’t get any deeper than about 2 inches in these dead spots - so obviously there is some debris (prob from construction) underneath which isn’t letting the grass root properly. " It's also not necessarily debris or compaction, it could be deflocculated soil or a greasy soil as well. Yeah. Seriously. Try searching for soap mixes. Yeah. I'm serious.