"MSR" wrote in message
...

continuous rain since then (the brief heat wave killed some of it off)
and my three dogs,

Your dogs are the problem. We have a similar issue with the soil here.
We have a large field next door owned by the school that's used as a dog
park by the folks in the neighborhood. A few years ago the school decided
they had enough of the field of mud and on advice of some of the neighbors
they fenced off one section of the field for 4 months and threw down grass
seed. The mud disappeared and the grass grew lush and full, both the
original grass and the new seed, bare spots disappeared, etc. The contrast
between the unfenced part of the field and the fenced section was like night
and
day. Then they moved the fenced section from the good field to the
mud section. By the time the grass had come back and the sod had
gotten strong, the section that was previously lush strong grass had been
beaten back into the mud and weak grass that the field originally started
off as.

There was then talk of banning off-leash dogs but the neighborood dog
owners threw a fit.

Ted