I can tell you are not watering deeply about once a week or your
lawn would have survived and remained green. Since it is bermuda I
doubt the lawn is dead unless it was nearly dead before you left.
Normal watering for this time of year would be 1 inch, all at one time,
about once every 7 days. Actually if that was normal then everyone would be doing it. I should reword that: normal watering would be
every day for 10 minutes. PROPER WATERING would be 1 inch, all at one
time, about once every 7 days. Here is an illustration showing the
difference between proper (on the right) and normal (everywhere else).

Those happen to be Kentucky bluegrass lawns in Pennsylvania (thanks to morpheuspa for the pic). As you can see it is not a subtle difference between similar shades of green. It's more like one lawn is growing and the rest are dormant.

Do you water yours or simply wait for rain? If you want it to look good you should be watering deeply and infrequently. You can measure one inch by placing cat food or tuna cans around the yard. Time how long it takes to fill the cans. My test took 8 hours with an turbo oscillator type sprinkler. High flow in-ground systems can do that in 20 minutes. Every system is different so you'll have to measure yours.

In the mean time I would apply the inch for your test and wait at least 3 days before watering again. Bermuda is one of the hardiest plants there is. It will come back.

Oh and if you get runoff before you fill the cans, stop and let the water soak into the soil. Then restart in 15-30 minutes and restart your timer clock. If you get runoff, please write back.

Bermuda never dies, especially if you want it to die lol. It will come back when it cools down and with a little extra water

Thank you! I will do that. Funny thing is that I didn't even scalp it. I cut it to about 2.5 - 3 inches, so not scalping at all. I usually have to keep my lawn pretty tall at around 4 inches to stay green. It gets ALOT of sun during the day and if I were to keep it any shorter, I would literally have to cut it 3 times a week. That is how fast it grows. Guess I had it fertilized pretty well. I have a meter I have used a couple of times to make sure the fert levels are good.

I watered it the first morning heavy and hand watered it a couple more times for a couple of mins just out of concern. Kills me because I had my lawn looking the best it has ever looked. Hope it comes back soon.

Is there a chance I did kill it? Can someone kill Bermuda with cutting it too short once. Is that even possible?

I was watering twice a week for a while, but have not in about 3 weeks and then went on vacation. My lawn looked like the picture on the right where the color was a dark green and healthy looking lawn. People would compliment my lawn almost every weekend when I would be outside working on it and they walked by. The weather has been extremely high and dry the past couple of weeks and I have been so busy with work and have neglected it. I am going to install an in ground sprinkler system this weekend. I have been feeling guilty, so I have been watching youtube videos of installing a sprinkler system myself. Should be pretty easy, but just need to figure out my placement of the heads.

I will make sure to water an inch a week from now on.

More important than an inch a week is to do it all at one time. Don't make it 1/7-inch every day.

When you dig the trenches for your sprinklers, ALL the dirt has to go back into the trenches. That means it will be mounded up over top of the trench. If you don't do that you will end up seeing the trenches forever as the soil settles over the next few years.

David, your comments about normal and proper watering made me laugh.

For what it's worth, I'm running a test on my front lawn right now. I have a Tif-419 bermuda lawn that I've kept at 1.5" this year. It was looking really nice right before July 4th weekend, but then I got a little busy and my grass grew to about 2.5" - 3" before I could mow it. Against better judgement, I took it back down to 1.5". This didn't seem to stress it too much, but of course now every time I mow, it doesn't look so good due to all the brown showing through.

So on Sunday, I mowed a test area (about 8' x 8') back down to 1". It looks like scalped grass. There is very little if any green left and quite a bit of dirt showing through. The front is getting watered whenever it looks thirsty. That's been as short as 4 days in the last month, and as long as 3 weeks back in June. My main concern, similar to the original poster, is that this area will dry out faster than the rest of the yard, but I'm hoping the well established root system will be able to carry it through. None the less, I'm testing with a screw driver daily.

I had performed a similar test on the common bermuda in the backyard earlier this year, but it wasn't as hot yet. That area also gets watered daily by the septic sprinklers. I have no idea how much water they put down, but they run for about 15 minutes and come on 3 - 5 times per day depending on our water usage. I chopped that grass from an average height of 7" down to 1" and it took about 2 weeks for full recovery. After that, the test area looked substantially better than the rest of the yard after I cut the grass to it's normal height of 2".

My hope is that the front yard will yield similar results and I can go back and cut the whole thing down to 1" with the intent of letting it grow back to 1.5" and maintaining it at this height. The two tests do not share a lot in common other than the principle is the same and both lawns are varieties of Bermuda. The front lawn, is a hybrid Bermuda that is being pampered per a schedule laid out by Morpheus in response to my soil test, while the backyard is mostly common Bermuda that gets little more than what nature provides.

I will take some pics tonight of what my lawn looks like and again in a week until it comes back. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Bermuda grass blades grow on stems. When you have bermuda growing higher than 2 inches the stems grow up vertically. Then when you mow it down to 1.5 or lower, you've mowed all the blades off and part of the stem. So what you see remaining is no blades and all these brown stems. It looks like you're looking at dirt. Then the new blades will grow off the cut ends of the stems. When you mow bermuda lower than an inch and do that 2-3x per week, the bermuda plant will replace the unsuccessful vertical stems with horizontal stems. Those grow multiple blades along the stem. We call this a horizontal growth habit. Then when you mow you don't cut the stems but you do mow the blades down.

I did not know that. I usually keep my grass long because it looks brown if cut short. I think I will play around with the length more next spring. I scalped it this spring and it came back fuller than last year. It was new sod last spring.

As you can see in my pic, I cut it too low and it is struggling to grow back. The edges and some rows that didn't cut evenly are growing back, but the center is struggling. I hope it recovers soon. Do you think I should wait longer or do I need to do anything else at this point?

Not sure why the pics are not showing

Got it to work this time

I thought you were supposed to keep Bermuda tall. Mine was about 4" tall and it was browning on the bottom. So I cut it down to 2" and all of it is brown. I think it died. All I have growing is crabgrass. I'm pretty sad.

I don’t frequent this site anymore, but I will tell you the Bermuda is fine. If this occurred recently, it’s not likely to recover fully before the winter, but will be fine next year.

Do a google search for the Bermuda Bible, and you will learn all the average homeowner needs to know about Bermuda.

Thank you. I appreciate the response. I was sad and thought I killed it. I'll look that up too.

HU, you didn't kill it. You chopped off all the green blades leaving only the stems. You can mow the stems even shorter and it will still come back.

Bermuda becomes the most dense when mowed low. That's the reason for that. In the south and west most of the golf greens are bermuda. When bermuda is mowed high, the grass stems grow upright. When bermuda is mowed low, the stems grow horizontally making the turf more dense.

Here's a picture. I've had this since 2008. One of the GardenWeb members at the time talked about standing ON his grass,, not IN it. This lawn was mowed at 5/8" two or three times a week to keep it looking like that.

Awesome! We will have to see iif and when it comes back. Its starting to get cool here in Albuquerque NM. I don't why I let it get long to begin with. I know fescue you don't want to cut short and maybe that's what I was thinking.

What do you think about over seeseeding with Ryegrass for the winter?

I hate the idea of overseeding with anything. The problem is the shade from the tall ryegrass delays the awakening of the bermuda in the spring. One of my neighbors nearly lost his bermuda due to the rye shading it into June. If you could kill the rye in late March then overseeding might be feasible. I don't know if there is a selective chemical to do that.

Good day guys, had the same situation as HU, im a completely noob with regards to lawn care, first time homeowner here. Texas location. I thought i messed up or killed our bermuda last week because i mowed it too low, it turned brown. Forgot its October. got a relief after i read here that i will not kill the grass. Thanks