Lawn Experts

We've lived here 5 years and each year we aerate and seed. This hasn't seemed to help, we have erosion, run off, and just in general - crappy environment for grass growing. I've joked with the neighbors (they have similar problems) about how hard it is to even grow dirt around here. What seems to be the problem is we live on top of a red clay mountain, this mixed with basketball sized rocks buried in the ground.

We decided this year we wanted soft, pretty grass - or at least a little better then we have. Yes, there are bigger issues at hand and YES there are other things we could focus on, and YES this is about GRASS. But this is about US, our kids play in the yard. We've been driving toward being outdoors more then indoors - even giving the go ahead to our toddler to play as much as he wants in the rain as long as it's not freezing cold, or thundering and lightening. Do I care that he's muddy and wet? Nope! He's only a kid once!! We just make sure he's not in his best clothes or shoes.

So I researched, and hired a company who's motto should indicate that they do a spectacular job. Their online feedback comments were terrific and I even polled a local mom's web forum to ask other moms if they'd used them and received only positive feed back (though not alot of comments) and I went with that. I talked with the company, they assured me that the grass would be fuller, and healthier. They even explained to me that we currently had 3 different types of grass growing on our lawn, and the 3 we have aren't the 'best' we could have in this area... So I was sold (not an easy thing to do) on the promotional speech, I bought the package. It was a pricey aeration and seed/feed visit, and then 3 'treatments' for weed/feed and 'greening' the lawn. This included insect control and and fire ant treatment, which we desperately needed - at the time of their initial visit we had about 14 mounds in the yard. After losing my brother to anaphylaxis from a fire ant bite, I'm pretty sure about not having them in our yard if we can help it.

Long story short - these photos sum up what happened to my yard. I received a call on Tuesday to confirm my aerate and seed (Tuesday it rained ALOT here and I had water standing in the yard) and I asked "are you sure this is a good time to do this?".... I was assured it was the BEST possible conditions for this to be done...... anyone care to give me their opinion of our outcome?? I'll post more on this as it happens... right now we're disgusted.