A lot of Ashland's housing stock went up during the building waves of the 1980s through the early 2000s, and those neighborhoods share a common story underground. The land was cleared and graded, the good soil got scraped off, and the lawn was installed on a thin layer of loam sitting on top of compacted subsoil and construction fill. Twenty years later that's the lawn we're called out to look at: decent-looking in spring, failing in patches by mid-July, and impossible to keep green no matter how much water goes on it. Ashland also has real topography. The ground rolls hard between the Sudbury River corridor and the higher neighborhoods, so runoff is a factor, and a sloped Ashland lawn will dry at the top and stay wet at the bottom on the same irrigation zone if nobody thought about it during the install.