What is your watering schedule? How often and for how long do you water? Do you change the schedule when it rains (or hurricanes)?

I don't have a watering schedule. I stopped watering it when it started to die back in June. June- September was really rainy. This month has been a little cool.

Thanks. Now I have a corollary question. How did you water the new sod between when it was put down and the time the rains came?

The fungus was caused by too much water in the soil. Since it is St Augustine, if it has been 3 months since Paul's Pest Control treated it, then I would apply ordinary corn meal at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet to treat the disease. Cornmeal is a biological approach. Ultimately what happens is a predatory fungus comes in and wipes out the disease fungus. That process takes about 3 weeks to see the improvement. Call your local feed stores to get pricing and availability. A 50-pound bag should be well under $10. It they are charging more like $20, then they are selling corn GLUTEN meal, not ordinary cornmeal. Corn gluten meal will not have the same effect.

@dchall_san_antonio

I was watering it every day for two weeks for 30 minutes. 10 minutes in the morning, 10 in the afternoon, and 10 at 6. It was looking really good until we cut it. We turned off the sprinklers when it rained.

Do you have a link or an image what the corn meal might look like?

Do you think it'll come back? Everyone said it died.

In the event it doesn't come back, do you know what other grass that'll survive the shade?

If you call around, they'll definitely know what corn meal is. You can also get (really small amounts of) corn meal at the grocery store--it's used to make corn tortillas, corn muffins, and so on!

Corn meal looks like...well, slightly yellowish flour, really. You can also use cracked corn if you can't get corn meal, but it's not as good and a lot slower.

If I may interject here, and in this one instance, David...has this gone too far for corn meal? I might be inclined to go with DiseaseEx just to get a fast curative for a hit that hard, then go with corn meal right after it to repopulate the better fungi and to get a population of protective ones down once the DiseaseEx fades.

Or whatever creative chemistry works on St. Aug best.

In most cases, I'm content with the corn, but it's later in the season when fungal activity is slower, and, well, that just doesn't look so good in terms of health...

Diana--if David overrides me, listen to him. He's much more of a southern grass person than I am, so what he says goes. My concerns are for speed of cure, dropping temperatures, and rescuing what we can as fast as possible as the season fades. That may or may not be a viable argument as it is now here in Pennsylvania where southern grasses (Meyer Zoysia and the like) would have little ticking clocks on 'em! :-)

Have mole crickets ever been considered?

The ugly truth is that NO turfgrass likes growing under a Live Oak, especially if the tree is full and healthy. St. Augustine will tolerate it to a certain degree but will still suffer. Remember that turfgrass and trees compete for sunlight (above ground) and water, nutrients, soil oxygen, and elbow room below ground.

It's a constant battle that trees will win.

Thank you everyone!

When we put down the corn meal- is there a water schedule we need to follow?

How often do we water or do we water it at all?

Chemical fertilizers must be watered in to dissolve the dry chemical sufficiently that the strong salts are diluted. The worst case is to let the chemicals sit there dry until the next dew comes. Dew is not sufficient to dilute the salts and they can burn the plants. None of that is the case with grains. Grains are actual food and do not dissolve like chemicals. Grains decompose by microbial action, so you don't "need" to water. But you may moisten it enough to wash it down to the soil. Moistening it also kick starts the decomposition process.