Green Lawn Care Tips and a Secret Lawn Tonic Recipe from a Golf Course Groundskeeper - Bargaineering

Green Lawn Care Tips and a Secret Lawn Tonic Recipe from a Golf Course Groundskeeper

Posted: 21 Jun 2010 09:04 AM PDT

A Very Nice Lawn I’ve been playing a lot of golf lately and it’s amazing how manicured some courses are. It’s also amazing how overrun others can be, considering the cost of your average round of golf! So it makes sense that the perfect person to dispense lawn care advice is the groundskeeper (really they’re called Greenskeepers) of your local golf course. He, or she, is the person in charge of making sure the course is up to par.

We don’t have a huge lawn in front of our house, which makes it even more egregious if it’s not properly maintained! For a while we’ve been battling weeds and one of the things I really hate buying are those toxic-looking weed killers. I feel like pouring that stuff on my lawn negates all the recycling we do… so in addition to lawn care tips, I scoured the web for some good suggestions for green ways to kill weeds. One thing I stumbled upon was a secret lawn “tonic” from a former golf course greenskeeper.

General Lawn Care

The key to winning the war on weeds it to keep a nice healthy lawn in the first place. This collection of tips comes from a variety of sources including ShelterPop, Grinning Planet, and others.

Water in the morning. First, it’s better to water in the morning when the temperature is cooler because less of the water evaporates. It’s also better because you want to wash away all the dew. Most lawn disease are caused by critters in the dew.

Water for long periods of time infrequently. This trains the grass to dig its roots deeper in search of water. By watering for an hour, rather than 15 minutes, the water will soak into the soil and the lawn will grow lusher. A lusher lawn, with taller blades of grass, will force out weeds, which will try to find easy bare spots to monopolize. Beware of overwatering, as it can lead to disease.

When seeding, presoak the seeds. Spin Martin, groundskeeper at the University of Tulsa, recommends putting the seed into a pantyhose stocking and soak it in water for 24 hours. Remove, let the water drain, and repeat two more times. After the third day, the seeds should start to germinate and prevent irregular growth. He says seeds given this head start will start to grow in 7 days, instead of 14-21.

When mowing, use a sharp blade. Dull blades will tear, instead of than cut, the grass and don’t cut it too short. Tearing will leave the grass vulnerable to disease, which is a bad thing, so make sure your mower blades are sharp. Also, leave the clippings on the lawn, it’ll replenish some of the nitrogen your grass will need.

Aerate. You might need to wear those silly shoes but aerating your lawn helps clear the way for nutrients, air, and water to help them reach the root zone of your grass.

Green Weed Killers

Russell Demotsis is the horticulturist at Mirimichi, a green golf course in Millington, TN owned by Justin Timberlake. He weeds by hand or uses Milorganite, which is a mixture of things you probably don’t want to know about. Weeding by hand is the greenest of solutions but depending on how much lawn, or how many weeds you have, it may not be an efficient way of dealing with the issue.

Here are a few green ways to deal with weeds:

Boiling water. Boiling water kills the weeds, and any nearby growth, so it’s best to be very targeted in your use of boiling water. It’s really good for driveways, where you won’t have much growth, and can be supplemented with salt. This is a bit like a scorched earth approach so use in a very targeted manner.
Lemon juice, vinegar. Lemon juice and vinegar increase the acidity of the ground, which makes it inhospitable to weeds. Vinegar is usually more expensive than lemon juice but you might have one or the other on hand. It’s best to do this on a dry day because it will easily get washed away.
Corn Gluten Meal. This has long been known as a natural weed killer and works well on weeds that spread by seed. Corn gluten meal and corn meal are two different things. Corn gluten meal is effective because it stops root growth, which means it’ll stop any seed from growing, including grass seedlings. It also has some nitrogen in it so it will help feed your lawn as well. This page by the City of Ottawa and this one at Iowa State’s Dept. of Horticulture has more information.

Secret Lawn Tonic for Killing Weeds

As promised, here is a fantastic recipe from Tim Heffron (he calls it a lawn tonic, I called it secret because I didn’t know it until I found it!):

1 can of regular beer (no light beer)
1 can of regular soda (any kind-no diet soda)
1/2 cup of liquid soap (do NOT use anti-bacterial dishwashing liquid)
1/2 cup of liquid ammonia
1/2 cup of mouthwash (any brand)
Pour into 10-gallon hose-end sprayer (other sizes will work too)

The secret and awesome part about this is that chances are you have all of this stuff at home (maybe not the sprayer or the beer/soda if you don’t drink it). I haven’t used it yet but if a former golf course groundskeeper says it’s legit, I’ll believe him… though I’m wondering where the gin comes in.

Do you have any good lawn care tips or weed killing suggestions?

(Photo: umair-ehmad)

Green Lawn Care Tips and a Secret Lawn Tonic Recipe from a Golf Course Groundskeeper from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

6 Documents You Need But Hate Thinking About

Posted: 21 Jun 2010 04:03 AM PDT

Courtroom In general, there is only one thing worst than dying… it’s thinking about dying. If there is one thing worse than actually dying and thinking about dying, it’s probably planning on dying. I think it’s safe to say that the whole business of dying is all together unpleasant and one of the reasons why people avoid thinking and talking about it.

Unfortunately, it’s also one of the biggest financial mistakes you can make for your family. I’d say it’s the biggest financial mistake you can make but if you’re dead, I suppose the consequences are pretty inconsequential to you anyway. But unless you just don’t care about your family, making a few end of life decisions before it’s the actual end of your life can simplify things for your family.

So today we’ll discuss six documents you need but absolutely hate thinking about.

Last Will & Testament

Your Last Will & Testament is a legal document that, among other things, explains who will be your Personal Representative/Executor, what powers that individual will have, what should be done with your assets, how that property will be transferred, and, if you have children and they are still minors, who will serve as Guardian of your children.

If you have a trust-based estate plan, your trust will cover everything most of the asset transfer pieces I’ve listed above. One other minor distinction is that the Executor is called your Administrative or Successor Trustee. Your Last Will & Testament will act as a “Pour Over Will” and cover the transfer of assets into your trust (that the trust didn’t cover), what will happen to those trust assets after your death, and the issue of Guardianship of minor children.

Advanced Medical Directives

Advanced medical directives, or advanced health care directives, are a set of three documents that explain what you would like done in terms of treatment and who you would like to make decisions on your behalf. The three documents, and their descriptions, are:

Living Will: Your living will explains what types of medical treatment you want in the event you are incapacitated and cannot decide for yourself. They can be as broad or as specific as you want. Your living will can do things like outline a course of treatment or forbid the use of expensive medical treatment if it only serves to prolong the inevitable. The living will is only used if the person is unable to give “informed consent” or is incapacitated.
Health Care Proxy: In the event you don’t have a living will or it doesn’t cover a specific scenario, the person designed as the health care proxy will make decisions on your behalf. Your health care proxy has the same rights to request information, refuse and elect treatment, as you do.
Health Care Power of Attorney: (a.k.a. Durable Power of Attorney) This is not specific to medical issues but is relevant because who you elect has the ability to execute legal documents on your behalf, such as sign checks, make bank transactions, and conduct business as you. (in the case of mental illness, these are known as Psychiatric Advance Directives or Ulysses contracts)

Durable Power of Attorney

I touched on the topic of a power of attorney in the advanced medical directives but I wanted to expand on it. The reason you need a power of attorney is that in the event you are incapacitated for an extended period of time, you will need someone to make some non-medical decisions on your behalf. Your power of attorney is your way of picking who you want to be in charge of your legal and business affairs when you can’t be. In legal terms, they are an agent, or an attorney-in-fact (vs. an attorney-at-law), working on your behalf.

A durable power of attorney is a power of attorney that continues to be effective if you are incapacitated. A regular power of attorney is no longer valid if you die or are incapacitated. A Springing Power of Attorney is a type of power of attorney that takes effect only after the grantor is incapacitated or dead. Finally, unless the power of attorney is irrevocable through its own terms or some law, the grantor can revoke it.

Updated Beneficiary Information

This isn’t so much a document as it is something you need to revisit. You need to set beneficiaries for all of your accounts, even if you don’t think you need to. It is important that the beneficiary you set matches what you outline in your Will, if you’ve covered it. If they don’t, local laws will apply as how to determine who receives the proceeds.

Finally, don’t set minors are beneficiaries. In some areas, minors cannot receive or control proceeds from insurance. So if you set them as the beneficiary of your life insurance policy, and you die, then it could lead to further complications (which you are trying to avoid).

Instructions on where stuff is

Finally, leave a little instruction manual to everything you think someone will need should they have to sort out your life after the fact. At a minimum, this includes all of your financial accounts, from bank accounts and brokerage accounts to where you have the deed to your house. Make it very simple for someone to come in and put everything in order because it’ll save them a lot of time.

A side benefit of putting together an instruction manual is that it forces you to collect and organize everything. Did you have an account you forgot about? What about a policy coverage you weren’t aware of? We accumulate a lot of stuff, financial stuff included, that we forget about. Taking the time to sort it out can be very valuable.

Do you have a last will and testament? Advanced medical directives or a guide to where stuff is? Of the six the only two I’ve addressed are the beneficiary information (which is redundant for us) and a guide to “where stuff is.”

(Photo: crobj)

6 Documents You Need But Hate Thinking About from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

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Monday, June 21, 2010