I'm going to suggest you not contact True Green for the time being until we discuss the concerns here. It's best if you're well informed going in.

Before we can help we need to know where you live and what your goals are for the lawn. Do you want the very best lawn on the block or do you want something green that keeps the mud out of the house? Or something in between. Base on the appearance of the yard and what's in the picture, I'm guessing you live in the south, but the nearest city or town would help a ton. If you do live in the south, there is really no seed that is going to germinate right now.

Since you are on a budget, cancel the aeration. You will get much better results by spraying the garden with shampoo at a rate of 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. The aeration would likely cost you $200 to $300. In my experience core aeration never worked. Spraying shampoo will cost about 50 cents plus $20 for a hose end sprayer. Also in my experience I sprayed my lawn once, years ago, and it still gets very soft when it rains. I'm on several lawn forums and the experiences are the same. I was one of the shampoo skeptics, but now I'm an advocate. Measure your yard to get the square footage and round up to the nearest thousand. Pour 3 ounces of shampoo into the sprayer for every thousand square feet. If you make a mistake, no problem, because people have tried to overdo it with shampoo and they cannot. It simply works. After the shampoo, carefully fill the bottle with water (no foaming over). Put the top on, connect to the hose, then spray it all out on the garden trying to get an even amount over the entire yard. Again, if you think you goofed it up, repeat - you can't hurt it. Follow up the shampoo spray with 1/2 inch or more of rain or irrigation to get the shampoo down into the soil. In 3 full weeks the shampoo will have finished its work. From then on you should notice easier digging and working in the soil, especially if it is damp/moist. You can use any shampoo you can see through. That means no shampoo/conditioner combo products. I use baby shampoo, but any clear product from Dollar Tree should work as well.

Regarding peat, you don't need any. I'm going to try to steer you away from seeding, but even if you go ahead with the seed, you still don't need peat. Mother Nature does not cover Her grass seed with peat. It's an extra expense you can save to go toward buying your new sod!!

So if you don't aerate and don't use any peat, I've saved you $400 already. That will buy a lot of sod.

Also, lawn care is not that hard. True Green and other lawn care companies are for people who are not on a budget. So far us experienced amateurs will have spent exactly zero on their lawns by this time of year. Now does happen to be the time to spot spray a selective herbicide on established lawns. In your case you need Round Up for some of your weeds. Well, all of your weeds. We'll know more when you tell us where you live.

Thank you so much. You were spot on about the south - I’m in Dallas, Texas!

Okay think about two types of grass. Hybrid bermuda will not thrive if there is any shade. St Augustine will thrive in a mix of sun and shade. If you were to put common bermuda seed down now, you would be very disappointed for the next few months. If you put it down in mid June, you'll have a full lawn by July. That's why you don't want to seed anything right now. There are other reasons, but in the south, that's a big one. Common bermuda seed needs HOT soil to germinate quickly.

I assume True Green sprayed your weeds. Give that 3 weeks to kill them off and reevaluate. Personally, I would spray anything green with Round Up after that. By the way, 2024 Round Up no longer contains glyphosate. The stuff it has now maybe be better or worse, but that's a big change.

I was thinking of using Pennington Sun and shade for tall fescue lawns

The best thing I can say about tall fescue in Dallas is that it will germinate this time of year. Here are the problems with that.

Dallas gets about 15 degrees too hot in the summer for fescue to survive. You could make it survive with excessive watering every afternoon simply to keep it cool.

Seed planted now will also bring up crabgrass seed. Crabgrass is a summer annual plant which is ideally suited to brutal heat. Seeds germinate in about 3 days which make you think you're a genius for your excellent seed germination skills. By the time the fescue seeds germinate in 14 days, you'll already have an excellent stand of crabgrass.

The fragile roots of the new fescue will not make it through summer. This is slightly different from the first con above. That one is about excessive watering. The fescue will likely die off fully by mid July leaving you with an excellent crabgrass lawn. Still, crabgrass will keep the mud out of the house. It forms a very dense turf.

If you really want to have a Pennington Smart Seed lawn, please wait until about late September to drop the seed. At that time of year the seed has plenty of time to get established with roots before next summer's heat hits. Also any crabgrass seed should not be an issue at that time of year. Fescue in Dallas will still need more water than any other type of grass. What should you do in the mean time? Anything you want. Just water and something will fill in. You would be killing it all in September prior to seeding, so just let weeds grow. Getting roots in the ground is important. Or, you could simply mulch it about 3 inches deep and let the mulch work its magic.

In other news, seed does not need fertilizer for about a month. The seed itself contains enough nutrients to germinate the seed and establish the root in the ground. It could be that Pennington has a slow melting fertilizer in the bag. I don't know. But in my opinion they are selling something that is 'too good to be true' just like the weed-n-feed products.

Okay now I'm going to try to sell you on a warm season turf like hybrid buffalo, hybrid bermuda, or St Augustine.

There are two kinds of buffalo grass - hybrid and wild. The wild buffalo grass (which comes in bags of seed) forms a straggly, thin turf which easily accepts weeds. It shoots up seed heads and flowers faster than the grass itself grows which makes it look unkempt quickly. The hybrid buffalo varieties grow much more densely and with no seed heads. The hybrid buffalo comes as plugs placed at certain intervals. Then as the plugs take hold they spread to form a sod. The wild seeded buffalos do not spread like the hybrids do. The dense hybrid sod helps to keep weeds out. Buffalo grass will go dormant and turn brown at the first freeze. The best feature of buffalo grass is low water usage and low fertilizer requirement. It can go temporarily dormant in the summer, but it recovers when it rains again. Buffalo can usually be mowed high or low and remain dense. It requires at least 7 hours of unfiltered sun in the summer.

Similarly there are two kinds of bermuda. The wild kind is called common bermuda and can be purchased as bags of seed. Most everyone considers common bermuda to be a weed, but there are some improved varieties of seeded bermuda which may last longer into the fall before turning brown. When bermuda seed is scattered on hot soil in the summer, it can germinate in 3 days and give you a pretty good lawn in a month. The hybrid varieties abound nowadays. One variety called TIF 419 was a miracle turf in the 50s when it was introduced in bulk. So many sod farms grow it still to this day that it is one of the cheapest sods you can get. It comes in rolls which are laid out on the ground. One con for bermuda is that if you want it to look good all season you'll have to fertilize every month. It can take as much fertilizer as you can give it. It also needs to be mowed relatively low compared to other grasses. Bermuda needs at least 5 hours of unfiltered sunlight per day.

St Augustine comes only as a sod. It does occasionally get seed heads, but the seeds are not viable. It comes in pieces about 18 inches by 24 inches. The pieces are usually set on the ground and butted together to completely cover the area you want. What I have had success with is setting the pieces several feet apart and letting the grass spread and create the dense sod that St Aug is known for. This saves a lot of money for those on a budget and with some extra patience. When temps are in the 70s, St Aug will send runners across the ground at a rate of about 15 feet per year. Here's a picture.

You can see the runners going in all directions. After two seasons, all those runners knit together forming a very dense turf as seen in the rest of the picture. The tufts are the original sod pieces with everything in between being the result of runners. When you use St Aug like this, it becomes fairly economical to install.

There's more to all of these alternatives. I'll let you chew on it a little and ask more questions. Bermuda and St Augustine are by far the dominant turf types in use in the South. There's a reason for that.

In addition to what's mentioned above, I would dig up a few chunks in the yard and look for grubs. They'll be little white worms rolled up like a C. If you find them, I would put down a grub killer before doing anything else. Otherwise, the grubs will eat the grass roots.

Don't put down peat moss. Peat moss is only good for seed starting because nothing will live on it. It's sterile. You want your yard to be alive with microbes. Put down compost if you put something down. If you grow tall fescue from seed, you need to cover it with dirt. Maybe 1/4-1/2". Otherwise it won't germinate well.

Aerating isn't a bad idea. The seeds will fall in the holes and it will help them from drying out. I don't know if shampoo works better. It might. I've never tried it. I get regular core aerations and I don't have compaction issues. Maybe with shampoo I wouldn't either.

As mentioned above, I wouldn't go with tall fescue. It doesn't spread out. It forms clumps. The clumps are very durable, but a warm season grass that spreads out would be better.