Back story:

Bought a house that had a backyard of solid clay and the existing lawn (if you can call it that) was done. Jan 2011 we had some big rain that flooded my backyard several times and my garage so last May I had drains, irrigation and new sod installed. The soil was completely renovated, ammendments, till, etc. I used Marathon 1 sod.

The lawn looked great and took well to the ground. I had a leaf hopper infestation but left it alone since eveyrthing I read said they dont do any harm.

After about a two months some of the grass started to brown a bit so I gave it more water in the areas since it is a slight picth in that part of my yard. Around August the brown started to spread and take over a large portion of the yard but not completely kill the grass. Water didnt fix it, so I backed that off to normal again ... 1 inch/week.

In October, I noticed the dead grass was pulling out very easily and the ground is damp. So I backed off the water in case it was overwatered. No change.

Being a noobie yard owner (first house) I did not fertilize since the yard was installed. So about 4 weeks ago I gave the lawn Scotts Winterguard fertilizer and the green grass perked up a bit but I still have an abundance of brown.

Upon close inspection, I found several blades that have either black streaks or yellow streaks on them. I took samples to a local nursery and they said it might be a fungus but to also consider grubs. They also recommend removing the dead thatch.

I have removed the thatch and now the grass is very thin. I also raked out some grubs during thatch removeal but havent inspected to see the extent of their population. Since its so late in the season, I've read that there isnt much that can be done to grubs right now anyways, so I'll wait until next May and use an organic remedy if its an issue.

Some of the areas seem to be hard again (even though ts a 6 month old lawn). So here are my questions:

1) Since I've de-thatched the yard, should I aerate it now as well?
2) Since the lawn is thinned, I assume I should seed it. Can I do that now? Should I use the same type ... Marathon 1?
3) Should I top dress the yard? If so what should I use? If used with seeding, do I seed first then top dress or vice versa? Does aerating affect this process?
4) Is it possible I have a fungus and grub problem?

I know its a long story and I apologize. Hoping someone can give this rookie some guidance so I dont completely kill the lawn.

Thank you.

Greg

It really makes a difference where you live. Based on the subtle hints in your message I'm guessing you live in the San Diego area. If not please let us know so we can provide better suggestions.

Jan 2011 we had some big rain that flooded my backyard several times and my garage so last May I had drains, irrigation and new sod installed.

You have a drainage problem. When you say you had drains installed, do you mean you had the yard regraded using a tractor and a box blade? Because that is what you need. Sometimes when you have other landscaping in the way, drains are the only solution. The best solution is regrading.

The lawn looked great and took well to the ground. I had a leaf hopper infestation but left it alone since eveyrthing I read said they dont do any harm.

You'll see a lot of bugs that are not a problem. Try not to jump to conclusions with every insect you see.

After about a two months some of the grass started to brown a bit so I gave it more water in the areas since it is a slight picth in that part of my yard. Around August the brown started to spread and take over a large portion of the yard but not completely kill the grass. Water didnt fix it, so I backed that off to normal again ... 1 inch/week.

In October, I noticed the dead grass was pulling out very easily and the ground is damp. So I backed off the water in case it was overwatered. No change.

Your responses to the situation were perfect. I think your instincts are good, but you can go a little further in backing off on watering.

Being a noobie yard owner (first house) I did not fertilize since the yard was installed. So about 4 weeks ago I gave the lawn Scotts Winterguard fertilizer and the green grass perked up a bit but I still have an abundance of brown.

Good instincts again, or just lucky. Sod is usually well fertilized when you receive it, so it did not need any more until the fall. Had you fertilized in the summer you would have only added more stress to the heat stress already. In the future, 2/3 to 3/4 of your nitrogen should go down in the fall. The rest goes down in late spring after the flush of spring growth.

Upon close inspection, I found several blades that have either black streaks or yellow streaks on them. I took samples to a local nursery and they said it might be a fungus but to also consider grubs. They also recommend removing the dead thatch.

"Might be a fungus but also consider grubs." They're nuts because the picture is of grass carrying several diseases. Grubs kill the roots of the plant and the plant withers away from lack of moisture. You can have both grubs and disease, but that's not what you have in the photo. Also, fescue very seldom gets thatchy and should not happen in a year. Raking did no harm, so that's fine.

1. Hard soil is your concern but it is not your problem. Hard soil is normal when the soil is dry at the surface. Lack of organic matter in the soil is the problem that leads to hard soil all the time. Soil with a good fungal population will become soft when moist and turn hard when it dries out. It should act like a sponge. If it remains hard even when moist, then you have the indication of not enough fungal population.

2. People who seed fescue to begin with should understand that it needs to be seeded every fall until you get to the density you want it to be. Sod should already be at a proper density. Still you need to watch it to see if you need to reseed in the fall. In your case, yes, you need to because it has thinned out. Now is the time but new grass will get the disease immediately unless you do something about that. Use the same seed.

3. If you top dress with anything, it should be compost. Compost is the most expensive thing you can add to your lawn but your situation may warrant using it. Disease is caused by an imbalance of microbes. Compost provides a balanced source of microbes to the soil. If you want them to remain in balance and thrive, then you must feed them with organic fertilizer. Synthetic fertilizers do not have microbe food. The reason for compost and not soil is that adding more soil to an improperly drained yard will worsen the drainage situation. Compost completely disappears and does not change the level of the soil. If you want more help with organic approach and fertilizers, find the Organic Lawn Care FAQ in the Organic Gardening Forum of Gardenweb.

4. Yes it is possible to have both grubs and fungus.

Rather than aerating to soften the soil, I would suggest spraying the soil with a cheap shampoo. I like generic baby shampoo from Wally's. Spray at about 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet and follow it up with your normal inch of watering to wash the soap in deep. Then the third time you water after that, repeat with the soap before you water. By the second or third app of soap, your soil should be much softer when moist and it should become firm again as it dries out between watering. I have tried several long term solutions to hard soil, and this one works the quickest. It is a long time solution. Aeration makes you feel good but is not as simple as it seems. If you aerate (hard work and relatively expensive) you should follow up with a drenching irrigation where you try to fill the holes you just created. Ultimately proper amounts and timing of water is the key to solving the problem. You need to repopulate the fungi in your soil. They need even moisture over a period of a week or so to get going. Soap seems to help provide that.

I suspect you are keeping the soil too moist and that led to the disease. This time of year you should be watering once every 30-40 days, not once a week. In fact if you are in SoCal, you probably get enough rain every month in the winter, that you do not need to irrigate. As the soil dries out from a previous irrigation or rain, expect it to become hard. If it remains hard after the rain, then hit it with the shampoo again.

You are correct, I'm near SD but about 60 miles north. The problem with my yard (only 1100 sq/ft) is the current grading is the only option unless I completely rip out my back wall. City ordinace doesnt allow a slope toward the downhill in the back behind my rear fence so all the properties slope slightly toward the house. Granted the grade ends at my patio which is about 10 feet from the house itself. Yeah dumb design I know. My in ground drain system addresses the flooding from previous years and the ground was tilled, ammended and graded best as it could be when I had the sod installed last May.

The center of the yard is only 12 feet to my wall so the option of using a tractor isnt available, its more narrow and long than anything. At some point I will relandscape the entire thing but with two young kids, grass is my best option.

I have a few follow-up questions if you dont mind:

1) What do tou recommend to address the disease in the grass? How many treatments? The guy at the nursery sold me somthing called "Agri-Fos systemic Fungicide" an example is here: Agri-Fos

Will this work? Or is something better to address what you see in the image I provided previously?

2) once the disease is gone, should I put down the compost first and then the new seeed or seed with the compost over the top? What depth of compost? I've read no more than 1/4 inch

Again I really appreciate the help.

Thank You.

Greg

1) Any specific compost?
2) Since I dont want the disease to come back (probably due to overwatering) how should I handle the new seed? Just leave it be during the winter?

Thanks and happy new year.

Greg

Zone 9 - Orange County CA.

The big difference your location in SoCal makes is in watering. Soil quality has a lot to do with it. With pure sand you have to water more often. As soon as you mix sand with anything else, the water holding capacity goes way up. Orange County temps are fairly mild all year long and winds are humid with Pacific moisture, so even in the heat of summer you can probably get away with deep watering once every 10-14 days. Deep watering is an inch all at one time. Use a tuna can to measure how long it takes your sprinkling system to achieve an inch. My sprinkler takes 8 hours to get an inch. Others can get an inch in 45 minutes. You'll have to measure it yourself. The trick for you will be to get your soil porous enough to accept all that water without any runoff. My slow watering system is great for not having runoff. Making porous soil where the soil fungi come to your rescue. Softening it with the soap should help them propagate.

Any kind of compost as long as it is finished. Excellent finished compost will be sifted to filter out anything that you might recognize as original stuff. Should not be any twigs or bark looking stuff. The most important thing about finished compost is that it be room temperature. It might be holding some heat from the sun but it should not be warmer than 80 degrees in SoCal in the winter. Also it should smell very fresh like a forest floor after a summer rain. If it smells at all rank, dank, moldy, stuffy, acrid, or anything other than very fresh, pass it by. The amount to use is 1 cubic yard per 1,000 square feet. It is much easier to measure like that rather than trying to figure out 1/4 inch after you get it. Apply with a wheelbarrow, shovel, and the flat back of a garden rake. Be sure you have all the grass pulled up and the compost is not smothering any of it. You can easily kill a lawn by not getting it raked in properly.

Now we get to your main problem. You have both a soil fungus shortage and a plant fungus disease. If you kill the plant fungus with chemicals you will also kill the soil fungus that you might already have. Bummer, right? So this is where the compost will help. I am an organic lawn guy, so I can't help you with chemicals. I have never had any good success with fungicides because where I have always lived it is never the right climate conditions to apply fungicide (read the label). You probably have perfect weather every day. The only thing that has ever worked for me is ordinary corn meal. One of the fungi that decompose corn meal also happens to be a predatory fungus that usually wipes out grass disease - at least it has for me since 2002. But I also know you can't find ordinary corn meal in 50 pound sacks in SoCal (I've tried). Best you can do is shop in a Mexican grocery store and get a 25-pound bag of corn flour (NOT the premade masa mix). If you find that the app rate is 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. you CANNOT over apply corn meal, so don't worry about anything. It doubles as an organic fertilizer, so it is really good for everything and maintains the balance of good and bad fungi in your soil. You might be able to find ordinary corn meal at Ortega Tack and Feed in San Juan Capistrano. Call first and when they tell you they don't carry it, ask them for suggestions where to get it. There is still some farming in Hemet so the feed stores there might have something. You do not want corn GLUTEN meal for this, so be sure you are all talking about the same product. You want whole ground corn meal. If you decide to use chemicals, use them before you put the compost down. Read the directions for reapplication and follow them. Then about 3 weeks after using the fungicide, you can put the compost down. The compost will bring fresh soil fungi to your lawn after the effects of the fungicide have gone away. If you use corn meal you do not need compost to replace the fungi.

Have learned alot and discovered several failurse along the way. First off I de-thatched my entire yard (1200 sq/ft) using a hand thatcher. Quite the workout!

The fungus that was in the yard appears to be a leaf spot and then a melt out, hence all the thatch. Marathon 1 should not thatch like this and the melt out seems like the cause. Once cleared, I covered the yard with 35 pounds of corn meal and then left it for a few weeks. The yard seemed to get a tad greener so that was a good sign. However I still saw some of the spotting as before.

Thatching the lawn left me with extreme thinning, especially where I have a slight grade. Using a neighbors manual aerator (using cores not spike) I did some investingating. Discovery: the entire graded area is dry 1 inch below the surface. not good. Also the ground was hard even though I had the entire thing tilled and reworked back in May 2011 when I had the Marathon sod laid down ...*sigh*

I continued aerating for about a total of 200 sq/ft and then hit it with water. The ground soaked up the water faster than I could apply it in that area. So thats the second discovery I have now made ... no water at root depth and also most likely no soil microbes or at least very little.

Deciding I dont want to manually aerate the entire thing, I rented a machine and hit the yard. Some areas were very tough to get through and demanded more attention but finally I got it done.

I then started following up by watering the yard by hand (skipping my irrigation system) to be able to control where the water was going and at what rates. Leading to discovery three, the flat areas of the yard are growing faster due to too much water. Unfortunately a couple zones on the irrigation system have some flat and some grade spots so it wont work effectively.

The yard has now been getting some new, however very thin, growth. Using a water meter and measuring several depths(2/4/6 inch) I keep track of when I need to water. Understanding full well that one of the contrubuters of my issue was too much water in some spots that created the disease in the first place..

After a few weeks and letting the corn meal settle, I finally laid down compost at 1/4 inch depth ensuring that it was raked in to touch the surface. Found a great place at a nearby stable "Serrano Soil" that mulches on site and very resaonble at $2.50 per 2sq/ft bag.

A few weeks later. I continued to see some greening but still very very thin. The new blades are green and no sign of the disease, however being over cautious, I hit it again with corn meal.

Looking at the photos I originally posted I noticed somthing on the blades, they were brown at the tip. Which lead to the next discovery ... the grass is not getting CUT its getting PULLED and TORN. This is not good and easily allows diseases to penetrate the blades. Inspecting my mower balde, its as dull as a butter knife and the scary part is, the mower is new last June. I think its always been dull and helped contribute to the problems.

Which brings me to today. The corn meal is down for about two weeks and I'm not seeing the lawn disease YAY! I am taking the mower blade and having it sharpened in preparation for the spring so at this point all is looking well.

After that entire thing, heres my question: I now have to overseed since Marathon doesnt spread (a blessing and a curse) so what should I seed with? Do I stay the course or should I mix in something that is more resistant to diseases? I dont care if the overseed eventually takes over as long as I can keep the lawn healthy with normal routine maintenance (organic fetalizing, wtareing correctly, etc). I have two small kids that love the lawn so it gets used. No pets.

I've seen all types of seed in local nurseries including actual Marathon 1 but I'm not so sure I should keep the same?

Thoughts?

I cant believe how much I've learned in the past few months about taking care of a lawn. MAN its not easy to get it going and keeping it healthy. Thanks to DChall on his many many posts about organic lawn care. I have spenbt countless hours combing thouirgh posts on this site from many years ago thourgh now. Even go over the many "heated" discussion this board has seen over the years about composts, teas, etc. Reading them has convinced me to not use chemicals due to chemicles being what I call "empty calories" for lawns.

Hopefully I can come out on the other side of this with a GREAT lawn that is disease free.