Who? Me?

You know the drill and can explain it to Bruce, so I'm just hitting the high points here.

Dan's Soil:

Your OM levels now look really, really good. Lawns won't require much more than this, but you can certainly keep going if you like. It won't hurt anything. Some gardens will benefit from going even higher (I keep mine closer to ten percent), but it's not really necessary.

If you want to drop the tiniest touch of calcium, sure, go ahead. You don't need it. It'd be slightly better spent giving it to Bruce, but he really doesn't need it badly either.

Ditto with the potassium, although I never object to a little extra (it has little impact on pH, it tends to be the Great Ignored Resource, and so on. You've heard me go on).

Your magnesium is within entirely acceptable range, so no worries there. And K usually won't kick it out too well, being a weaker bond than Mg.

Even your micros look great.

So seriously, optional amounts of calcitic lime are 1 pound per thousand square feet done once. Optional amounts of potassium sulfate is anything up to 2 pounds per thousand square feet done once.

Bruce's Soil:

There are no major issues that demand correction, although I'd recommend correcting at least the potassium before it becomes a major issue--and it's heading in that direction.

Organic matter of 4.3% is really good for a starting point. I wouldn't mind seeing it go up (I never mind seeing it go up), but this is not shabby.

Optionally (and if it were me, I would), apply 3 pounds of calcitic lime per thousand square feet just to boost the Ca levels a little bit. These aren't noticeably short and shouldn't be causing issues, but adding it now means it has time to work in before you end up needing it in the future. :-) This'll kick the pH up a hair, although 6.3 is fine as far as I'm concerned (my soil balances perfectly at 6.2, some don't balance until closer to 6.5-6.7).

Magnesium levels are a titch higher than I'd like (but perfectly acceptable!), and the Ca might boost a bit of that out as well.

Potassium is a bit short. I'd kick that up. It's not severe, but there's definitely a shortage, and some extra K could really help with winter lawn performance.

The micros look good! While boron is a hair low, it's not enough to bother with, and I can't think of a plant that would have an issue with this. His iron levels are fine (almost identical to yours!) as well.

Bruce's Recommendations:

September: 3 pounds calcitic lime per thousand square feet. 2 pounds potassium sulfate per thousand square feet.

October: 2 pounds potassium sulfate per thousand square feet.

April 2019: 2 pounds potassium sulfate per thousand square feet.

daniel-

Did you say at one point you hire a guy to aerate for you?

I'm getting quotes from 200-325 dollars.......

Hi Joe. No, not me. I've never aerated. This season has been very revealing to me. As you know, we've gotten rain every few days, like 1 inch here, 2 inches there and so on for a few weeks. The spacing of the rain made a perfect experiment to see if extra watering beyond "deep and infrequent" helped or hurt. Well, my lawn never looked so good and especially so in the middle of August! There's also the theory floating around that rain water carries much more N than tap water, so maybe that helps, too, but I'm now convinced that I've been severely under watering my lawn. I don't think I realized how sandy my soil is because it just doesn't "look" sandy. I think what happened is that my lawn got drought stressed in about 5 days and it was so quick that I wasn't recognizing it as such. There are other things, but that's for another discussion. Did your lawn respond similarly to mine?

Mine certainly has.

For northern lawns, our weekly July/August watering is doing little more than keeping it alive. It's not practical or reasonable in price to give it enough to make it flourish during those months. September through June, you can.

However, this is a record-setting year in terms of rainfall. The ground is soaked, and that comes with its own dangers--fungal infections, most notably, which will love the combination of hot and wet.

This is the first year I've used Headway G in any real amount since i got hammered by fungus last year. I had one area of the lawn get it again in June-ish but those spots are now going away. Otherwise it looks like the fungicide worked... so far. Was it the fungicide that worked or just a change in conditions? Still very hot and wet so I'm going with the fungicide as the cure. Question now is whether I need to apply fungicides every year as insurance or if I can just wing it again.