Why You NEED a Reel Mower

There are a lot of good reasons to use reel mowers but there's always one time I really wish I had a reel mower. When overseeding. You likely have some areas in your lawn that need to be overseeded, sometimes every year. The grass could get thin or bare for various reasons such as being in a very shady area.

Normal gas, and even electric, rotary mowers have a fast spinning blade that creates a lot of turbulence under the deck. This can dislodge the seeds and give you poor seed to soil contact. Once the grass starts to grow, the impact of the blades can rip the new grass out of the lawn since the roots aren't long and strong enough at that point.

Does Liquid Aeration Work?

Your lawn can benefit from core aeration, especially if you have compacted soil. Renting or hiring someone to aerate your lawn can be expensive and purchasing a manual lawn aerator can be time consuming. There must be a better way?

There are products that claim to be liquid aerators that you spray on your lawn with a hose end sprayer. These include LazyMan Liquid Lawn Aerator, Aerify Plus and Nitron A-35.

But how well does liquid aeration work?

Easy and Affordable Organic Lawn Fertilizing Program

When it comes to organic lawn fertilizers there are many options and different people will find different products useful. I came up with two organic lawn fertilizing schedules that should be effective in many parts of the northeast. I'll be comparing it to a synthetic 4-step lawn program that would cost $24 per 1,000 sq ft per year.

You can use this program to help guide you toward developing your own organic lawn care program.

Trouble getting grass seeds to germinate?

Did you plant a new lawn or overseed an existing lawn and your grass seed failed to germinate properly?
That's very common. Grass needs three things to germinate. Good soil to seed contact, proper temperature and water. Lots of water!

Good soil contact is achieved by raking the soil to loosen it, then using the back of the rack to press the seeds in and/or top dressing with compost. Soil temperature should be above 70 degrees farenheight. This is one of the reasons fall is the best time to seed in this area. The soil will retain a lot of the heat from the summer while the opposite is true in the spring.

An Inconvenient Lawn

In 1984 Dr. June Irwin, a dermatologist in Hudson, Quebec, Canada who also owns an 80 acre farm where she raises chickens, sheep and geese, concluded there was a connection between the symptoms she was seeing in her patients and the herbicides and pesticides used in lawns. Her patients even had traces of lawn care chemicals in their blood. That's when she began her letter writting campaign to alert the newspapers, town meetings and other government agencies of her concerns over the severe health risks and unknown side effects on the environment.

Her devotion to the cause resulted in a 1991 bylaw banning the residential use of pesticides for cosmetic purposes in Hudon. Two major chemical lawn care companies, Chemlawn and Spray-Tech, filed suit against Hudson arguing they did not have the authority to institute such a ban. Both the Quebec Supreme Court and the Quebec Court of Appeals upheld the bylaw which banned pesticides.

The entire province of Quebec also enacted a ban and Home Depot doesn't stock those products. A quick look at homedepot.ca and I couldn't turn up any.

That story will now be part of a documentary by Paul Tukey of SafeLawns.org and filmaker Brett Plymale titled "Hudson: A Chemical Reaction" which is scheduled to hit the independant film festival circuit this year.

Encap Fast Acting Lime Review

Lime is an important soil conditioner for your lawn. Some people treat lime like a silver bullet or a fertilizer and apply it every year. It's not either of those and usually doesn't need to be applied every year.

If your soil has a low pH (acidic) lime can seem like a miracle cure. The reason is the pH of your soil can affect so many different things and correcting your soil pH can have dramatic benefits.

Benefits of Adding Lime To Your Lawn

Cool season grasses do better in a neutral pH so if you're soil is acidic you're grass won't grow as thick. Thin grass looks bad and doesn't help to crowd out weeds. Many weeds don't mind acidic soil so they'll have no problem growing where your grass won't.

Lime also provides calcium to the soil. If you're soil lacks calcium, it could lead to more dandelions since dandelions have an easier time reaching down into the soil to extract calcium. A proper ratio of calcium to magnesium is also important in clay soils, which cover most of the northeast region. According to SafeLawns.org, the proper ratio should be 7 parts calcium to 1 part magnesium. Too much magnesium can also lead to soil compaction in clay soils.

How to identify lawn problems

One of the problems with lawn care is you don't get to see the problem until it's too late. It would help if you could detect if there was a problem with your lawn sooner so you could do something about it.
To accomplish this you need to take off your rose colored glasses and have a good hard look at your lawn... with purple colored glasses!

I saw a web page talking about stress detection glasses that are used to see stress in plants up to 10 days sooner. They were very expensive. If you're a turf manager at a golf course or other sports field, the expense might be justifiable, but if you're just an average guy (Joe the Gardner?) spending close to $100 or more to see where your lawn needs watering or is otherwise stressed seems rather excessive. So I looked for other options.

Realtime Landscape Architect

I was hoping to find some free sprinkler design software to help plan out a sprinkler system I want to install but never seem to get around to. There doesn't seem to be anything out there. You would think at least one of the major lawn irrigation manufacturers out there would invest in putting one out and giving it away to help sell their products. Instead they have software that makes it easy for you to send them the details of your property so someone else can lay it out.


Along the way, I ran across Realtime Landscaping Architect. It's not free, but it is reasonably priced and they have a trial version available.

The samples caught my attention. The 2D plans looked hand drawn which I found to be very appealing. The screen shot you see on the right illustrates the sketched look in an example from the product info page.

Unfortunately, when I was playing around with the trial version at least, it doesn't draw the plan that way by default. Instead you get the regular rendered view that you see in most other consumer design programs.

Finally! A Sub $100 Rain Barrel That Looks Decent

There are some good looking rain barrels out there, but they can be pretty expensive. I can understand the decorative ones that look like terra cotta pots or whisky barrels costing around $200 or more, but even the simple looking industrial looking ones are usually over $100.

When I was looking for information on hose reels I noticed a new product on Suncast's website. Suncast now has a 50 gallon rain barrel.

I have to say, I really like how it looks. It's not as pretty as the fancy rain barrels that look like pottery and have a planter on top, but it doesn't look like industrial garbage either.

The best part is it comes with everything you need and is less than $100 including shipping. That sounds pretty good to me.

Even if you got a 55 gal garbage can from the hardware store, the bulk fitting, spigot, and other assorted components and put it together yourself, you wouldn't save much and it wouldn't look as nice.
The Suncast Rain Barrel looks like a winner in my eyes.

How To Quiet An Impact Sprinkler

Chik - Chik -Chik - Chik - Chik - Chick -- Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch

You know that familiar sound of an impact sprinkler. I find it pleasant, but in the early morning hours when your automatic sprinkler timer comes on, there may be situations where the noise is not appropriate. I have a little trick to help make an impact sprinkler be a little less noisy.

Fixing a Leaking Hose Reel

So wouldn't you know it, after reading all those reviews when I was trying to decide what type of hose reel I should get and seeing so many reports about leaks, as soon as I installed my hose reel, it leaked badly!

This post is going to be my initial review of the Suncast Side Tracker Wall Mount Hose Reel (model STA125B) as well as some information on how to fix leaks. The hose reel is great after everything was sorted out.

There are two types of leaks people seem to get. Leaks from where the spool connects to the base and leaks from the back of the leader hose fitting. I was anticipating the former at some point in the future. I was surprised that I encountered the later right away. But it was an easy fix so I'm not too concerned right now.

Choosing A Hose Reel

I never really gave hose reels much thought. For years, I've just used a hose hanger, similar to the one pictured right, that came with the house.

It's worked fine but it's not very convenient. At the end of fall I have to coil up the hose and then haul it back out in the spring.

It always winds up looking messy, no matter how much I try and keep it wrapped nicely. The loops get bigger and bigger as the season goes on and I get tired of messing with it. Especially when I need to use the entire length.

So last year I decided to start looking into what different types of hose reels are available and what I think would suit me best. I was a bit dismayed as there were a lot of negative reviews, especially for the cheaper, more common plastic hose reels.

I had some loose criteria when I first started looking. The hose reel should be wall mountable, the spool should be easy to detach for winter storage and it should hold at least 100' of 5/8" hose. Most of the time I would be pulling the hose out perpendicular to the wall, but I will also need to pull it out parallel to the wall to get around the front of the house, so it needed to accommodate both directions.