Your neighbor is living on borrowed time with Trugreen. If he has the one good guy doing the job, then fine. As soon as that guy gets a better job somewhere else, they will find another minimum wage guy to take over. They can ruin a lawn much faster than they can bring one back from the dead.

Why do you need fast grass? Wedding on the lawn in June? Or just to keep the dust down?

If you have been trying for 5 years and getting only mediocre results, you are probably not watering right and not mowing right. No amount of fertilizer will overcome those issues. Water is best done deeply and infrequently. Deeply means 1 inch all at one time and not 1/7-inch spread out daily over the week. Deep watering develops deep roots which can tap water deeper in the soil. Infrequently means monthly in the cool months and transitioning up to weekly during the hottest heat of summer. If you have an unusually dry bout of hot weather you might go to once every 5 days. Even through all the droughts we have in San Antonio and further south, I've never had to go to a 5 day interval. The basic idea of deep infrequent watering is to get water down deep and to allow the surface of the soil to dry completely between waterings. Weeds love it when the soil surface is continually wet. But most of them cannot germinate and take root in a dry surface.

If you are mowing at your mower's lowest setting you need to raise it. I dislike splitting hairs on which grass needs to be mowed at 3.275 inches versus 3.5 inches. I just have two settings - highest setting and lowest setting. If you have fescue, rye, and/or Kentucky bluegrass, aim for the highest setting. That is the most lush look you can hope for. Short grass never looks lush even for grasses which are supposed to be mowed low. Tall grass also resists weeds because of the shadow cast on the ground by the tall blades of grass. Most weeds need full sun to take root. Shading them out helps prevent them. Tall grass does not grow faster than short grass, and tall grass uses less water. With proper watering and mowing height it is possible to have no weeds without using herbicides.

If you have been applying straight chemical fertilizers for years and years, I suggest taking a year off from chemicals and trying organics. I was absolutely shocked at how my yard responded when I first tried organic fertilizer. I had been applying more and more chemical stuff and getting poorer and poorer results. One app of organic and I was shocked. I thought I had poor soil. I did. The organic fertilizer cured it. I've been organic ever since (2002).

Your dog pee spots are the result of poor soil being flooded with high potency liquid fertilizer. Biologically speaking the pee overwhelms the limited population of soil microbes and they shut down production of plant food to process the urine. You can quickly boost the population of microbes with a handful of ordinary table sugar scattered over each spot. Table sugar smacks the microbes and gets them back to reproducing. It takes them a week or so to reproduce back up to numbers that can help. After that your dog spots should clear up. You will have much greener and taller grass - as you already see at the edges of the pee influence. Urine, by the way, is an organic fertilizer. So there is some hint as to what you might expect to see with a more appropriate dose of a more appropriate fertilizer.

My favorite organic fertilizer is alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow). Apply at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Moisten them after application to keep the birds from carrying them away. You don't have to soak them, just mist them so they have some moisture to absorb. They will swell up and burst allowing the alfalfa to fall onto the soil. The fertilizer results won't be seen for 3 full weeks, but then, all of a sudden, you'll notice your grass is much greener, taller, and more dense.

You can plant seed now but expect it all to turn to crabgrass by July. Now is the time of year when crabgrass seed germinates. All it needs is daily water for a week. Oh wait! So does grass seed. So if you are trying to germinate grass seed that takes 2-3 weeks to germinate, you will be pleasantly surprised to see such good germination in only 1 week...until you realize too late that what you're getting is crabgrass. A much better time to seed is in the fall when crabgrass does not germinate. If you must have something quick and the area is small, you can try sod. Sod is more expensive but for small areas you might be able to swing it.

Thank you so much for the reply. I will definitely give your recommendations a try. A few more questions though. How often should I put down organic fertilizer? Is it like every six weeks or so? Also, I just want to get grass growing in the bare patches I have around the area where I put in a patio last year. Should I wait til fall for that? I also have a few pot hole like areas I want to build up in my yard and reseed. Can I still do that now and use the organic fertilizer at the same time? Finally, should I not try to mess with the weeds now or is it still ok to use something like trimec to cut down on them as much as possible?