Where do you live? Because for most of the country where fescue thrives, you are about 2 months late for putting down grass seed. You should have been killing the coarse stuff and nutsedge last August and seeding in September.

Your lawn folks were correct about how to kill the coarse grass. Use either a non selective grass killer (Grass-b-Gon) or a non selective plant killer (RoundUp). Kill the stuff you don't want along with a little bit of the good grass. Then follow up by reseeding the dead patches. One reason the coarse stuff might have snuck in is you got thin spots (for whatever reason) and did not reseed last year. Fescue needs to be evaluated every August to see if it needs more seed to thicken it up in places.

Nutgrass is killed out by a completely different product. Nutgrass is a sedge, not a grass, so you need a sedge killer like Sedgehammer or Image. Nutgrass usually only thrives in swampy areas, so you might look again at your watering schedule. I usually only see nutgrass when we get excessive rain. So this year in San Antonio we didn't get a nutgrass problem. But other parts of the country got storm after storm all summer.

So even though you might be late in seeding, hurry up with killing the spots that need killing and get to seeding. At least some of the seed will survive the winter and germinate as early as possible in the spring. It might even germinate in January or February if the weather hits just right, but then there's the risk of a later freeze killing the tender new grass. That's a risk to take, though, because seeding in the spring can be a problem in much of the country.

Again, I can help you more if I know where you live.

dchall_san_antonio thanks so much for the followup. First off I'm located in Minnesota and was planning on going with/trying dormant seeding was my hope being I know I was late. I guess my main questions were if I was killing more spots than I need to (spots that necessarily aren't the coarse fescue) but since I'm so paranoid now when I see anything with a thicker blade on it I'm fearful it's the coarse fescue. I guess I'm looking for advice on a solid way to identify the ugly stuff. And in terms of nutsedge..does my photo indeed appear to show nutsedge? thanks so much

I did see what looked like nutsedge. There is another sedge which looks like nutsedge, but it has different growth conditions. Green kyllinga looks just like nutsedge until it blooms.

Green kyllinga will grow just fine without much water at all. Being a sedge, it should be killed with one of the sedge killers. The sedge killers should not affect the surrounding grass, but read the label before you buy.

You can protect the surrounding grass when you spray the grass killer. Make a V notch, 3 inches deep and wide, in the center of two pieces of cardboard. Slide the notches toward each other on the grass until only the coarse grass is showing. Then spray the grass killer on just the coarse grasses. If you have larger areas to kill then make the notches bigger.