LOTS of tips. Organic is the easiest part, so I'll start with the part that most people have wrong - irrigation.

You should be watering no more frequently than once per week. Crabgrass is one of the symptoms of too frequent watering in the spring. Now sometimes Mother Nature just seems to want crabgrass, but you don't have to help it along. We call it deep and infrequent watering. Deep means 1 inch all at one time. Measure that by timing how long it takes your irrigation system to fill several cat food or tuna cans placed around the yard. Infrequent means once a week when the temps are above 90, once every 2 weeks with temps in the 80s, once every 3 weeks with temps in the 70s, and once a month with temps below 70. Why do it this way? Because weed seeds need continual surface moisture to germinate. When you allow the surface of the soil to dry out completely the weeds cannot get started. By watering deeply the grass will develop deep roots which allow it to get moisture stored deeper in the soil. This makes a more drought resistant turf that resists weed pressure.

Second is mowing height. If you are not mowing at the highest or next to highest setting on your mower than that allows a lot of sunlight down to the soil. Weed seeds also need full sun to germinate. When you provide shade with taller grass, those weeds, if they do germinate, will have trouble taking root.

Third is fertilizing. You might have to stop watching TV for this, because the advertisers would have you fertilizing in early March. Once the grass awakens in the spring there is already a lot of nutrients in the soil. The grass is going to grow like wildfire all by itself. When you fertilize early that encourages the grass to push past the natural nutrition in the soil and use stored energy (sugars) in the roots. By early May the grass is depleted and looking poorly. It actually is in poor health when you fertilize early. Whereas had you waited until LATE May (Memorial Day) to fertilize the first time, the grass would be on a normal pace through the summer. But Scotts pounds the commercials into your brain to sell their products way too early and the grass actually suffers. That leads you to buy more fertilizer and the Scotts people rub their hands in glee. Bwahahahaha! So had you been reading here you would know all that and you would only have one dose of fertilizer so far this year. But if you did fertilize early, then adding more in about early May was the correct response. It needed it. I'm not sure what the 3rd dose was all about. Also when you fertilize, don't use a weed-n-feed product. Those are very hard to apply correctly and get the right results. Besides the timing is way off on those. When you need to fertilize use a fertilizer. When you need to kill weeds spot spray with a liquid spray like Weed-B-Gone.

When you use a 12-12-12 fertilizer you are very likely over applying P and K. If you get a $25 soil test from Logan Labs and post the results here, morpheuspa will give you a free read and tell you exactly how much P and K you need to add, where to get it, and when to apply. Grass mostly needs N, so adding excess P and K can be expensive and even a little irresponsible depending on the soil and your conditions.

Why were you aerating 2x per year? I assume someone told you to do that, or do you have a problem you were addressing?

Organics is easy. Without getting into a lot of history I'll just suggest getting one of the following materials at your local feed store: soybean meal, cottonseed meal, alfalfa pellets, corn meal, corn gluten meal, or any other ground up nut, bean, or seed that they have in stock for under $15 a bag (50 pounds). The application rate for the first app is 10 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Subsequent apps can be applied at 15-20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. That's all there is to it. If you want to continue to use your chemical fertilizer you can, but you don't have to. The organics take 3 full weeks to see the improvement. Here's a demonstration picture.

That spot was fertilized with alfalfa pellets in mid May. The picture was taken in mid June. You can see the improved color, density, and growth. The lawn is zoysia. Thanks to mrmumbles for posting his photo here. In addition to the ground grains you can also use a product called Milorganite. There are other commercial bagged organic fertilizers but they cost as much as 6x more than these bags of grains. The contents of the commercial organics is a long list of all the grains I listed, so you're getting the same stuff. If you have questions about any of that, feel free to ask.

Thank you so much!!!! I'm way over watering, over fertilizing, and simply over doing all the wrong things. I will adjust my irrigation system immediately.

Should I have a need for a crabgrass preventer in the spring? It's insane how much crabgrass I have in my yard right now.

After fertilizing in late May, when else should I put down fertilizer? I will be using soybean meal. It is $14.60/50# at my local feed store.

I was aerating and overseeding in the spring and fall on advice from a neighbor. i'm guessing neither of those are necessary?

If you have crabgrass, or any other weed the preventer will take care of, use it. It saves some headaches later, but check the bag to see how long the shield lasts. You may need to reapply to successfully confound crabgrass, sedges, and whatnot, which will happily sprout all through summer.

>>After fertilizing in late May, when else should I put down fertilizer? I will be using soybean meal. It is $14.60/50# at my local feed store.

I actually choose a slightly different schedule for organics. "Sometime in the first half of May" for the first feeding since organics take about three weeks to begin working. That brings the feeding release into play in late May or early June. I tend to strike it on May 1, but the window is pretty wide.

August 1, September 1, and October 1 (optional on this one) round out the organic feeding season with soybean meal at 15 pounds per thousand square feet.

Then, when grass growth stops but it's still green, feed at bag rate with any high nitrogen, low everything else, synthetic fertilizer. That's the winterization step, which will help your lawn survive the winter (and possibly even stay greener through winter!), and return earlier in spring.

>>I was aerating and overseeding in the spring and fall on advice from a neighbor. i'm guessing neither of those are necessary?

Neither is necessary. Overseeding is a fall thing, if required, but if your lawn is noticeably thinning out in a single year, something isn't right. Even fescues, well-treated, don't require yearly overseeding.

Like David noted, the Logan Labs test would pin down any resource issues in your soil.

Thank you morepheuspa for your help as well.

When do I apply the 1st round of preventer?

Is there a "best" location to get the sample from? My yard is so big that I have fair areas, bad areas, and worse areas.

I know I'm a week late for the August 1 feeding, but I'm thinking to finish off the year I could do August 8, Sept 8, and Oct 8. Is that correct?

Should I apply Milorgranite at the same intervals as the soybean meal?

Lastly, bare spots...should I put some seed and straw on those this fall to get some grass growing on them? I'm guessing my brown and thin areas will come back to life once I get everything else lined out.

Sorry for all the questions, I just want to make sure I'm taking the right steps. I will get a sample sent in tomorrow to Logan's Lab and post the results when I get them.

The first round of pre-emergent goes when soil temperatures rise over fifty degrees. The easy way to determine that is that it's when the forsythia first start to bloom.

For sampling, choose twelve to fifteen different locations and take small amounts from each, well-distributed across the yard. If you have a section that differs a ton from others, it might be wise to take a second set of samples for a second test from there.

You're not that late on organics, which have no great need to go on a specific date. So if you feed now, and then September first, you're fine. If it drifts past this weekend, maybe kick the later feedings to the tenth of the month or so. Milo would be the same as soybean, except that I'd recommend 20 pounds per thousand square feet instead of 15.

Bare spots...depends. A bluegrass lawn will tend to fill holes if well fed and well cared for. Rye and fescue won't and require reseeding. A mixed lawn usually has enough bluegrass to repair itself.

Organics are safe to use any day of the year. I'm not going to complain about picking a different day to apply. Generally grass should be fertilized in the late spring, early fall, and late fall. With organics you are basically feeding the soil microbes that make the soil healthy. When the soil temp is above 50 degrees the microbes will produce plant food in about 3 weeks. When the soil temp is below 50 degrees, there are a different set of microbes working than you would find in the warmer soil. It's not crystal clear what they're doing in the winter, but you always see the results in the spring no matter whether you use a winterizer or not. In the spring it's like everything in the garden has been reset and you have a fresh start.

>>It's not crystal clear what they're doing in the winter,

Most of them winter in Florida.

:-)

Psychrophiles are active under fifty degrees and dormant above that point (give or take quite a bit; every species has an optimal temperature range). Some microbes are active to freezing (or even below as entire colonies of bacteria living on ice will attest).

However, the colder it is, the slower decay progresses. Both because thermal energy isn't as abundant and because the enzymes necessary to eat are more expensive to produce if you need to make the cold-hardy version.

Hyper-thermophiles don't come into play for us. You find them in boiling hot springs, around thermal vents in the ocean, and other places that are simply too hot for most other kinds of life.

Thermophiles kick in around 100 degrees (the technical number is 105°), and can digest, live, and reproduce so fast that they can easily kick the temperature of a compost pile to 160°. At that point, digestion of material goes so quickly that I've noticed the difference overnight.

Mesophiles like the same kinds of temperatures we do, give or take, being comfortable between 50 and 100 (so it's unsurprising that we surround ourselves with plants that are the same). Again, different species have different preferences. They're middle-range on their speed of digestion as well, and these are the microbes we rely on most to do our organic feeding for us.

I should hopefully be getting my Logan Labs results back any day now. The sample was delivered on Monday 8/17. I've been putting on putting down soybean meal until the results, but i'm afraid that i'm waiting too long. Again, I have 25,000 sf and i'm seeing more weeds than grass these days. Should I go ahead and put some soybean meal down now? thanks.

Also regarding watering. I have 10 zones to cover my lawn and I've been reading that some people water for 8 hours to get 1". There's no way that each zone can water that long. What do I do about that? I'm currently set on 40 min per zone.

Soy is fine and won't interact with any of the results, nor with any applications that would have to go. Organics are pretty much always OK.

For some reason I'm having trouble uploading my picture, but ironically my lab results came in when I checked my email. Here they are, Thank you for all your help.

Depth of Sample: 6"

Total Exchange Capacity (M.E.): 7.55

Ph of soil sample: 6.9

Organic Matter, Percent: 3.89

Anions:

Sulfur: 8

Mehlich III Phosphorous: 246

Exchangeable Cations:

Calcium: found 1803, desired 2054

Magnesium: found 454, desired 217

Potassium: found 482, desired 235

Sodium: 39

Base Saturation %:

Calcium (60-70%): 59.68

Magnesium (10-20%): 25.05

Potassium (2-5%): 8.18

Sodium (.5-3%): 1.11

Other Bases: 4.50

Exchangeable Hydrogen (10-15%): 1.50

Trace Elements:

Boron: <0.2

Iron: 127

Manganese: 88

Copper: 1.56

Zinc: 2.67

Aluminum: 429

Here is a picture of the actual report