As a young teen I remember Kmart offering black & white folders with Jerry's suggestions as they used him as a spokes person for their Lawn & Garden dept. I've used many of his concoctions and in my Opinion his ideas were good for those times. The eighties and on. Organic as we have it today wasn't that common except for those who subscribed to Organic Gardening magazine and followed those suggestions they published. I use the Public Library collection of Gardening Books and can tell you that there are several well worn Jerry Baker Books in the collections. His distractors can say what they will about him being a quack and not ligit, but I'll speak for what his attempt to show beginner gardeners and fruit orchard growers that they could do with common chemicals for pennies. My Grand Mother used to read her women's magazines when I was a little kid and get similar tips for using common soda in water to "sweeten" soil, (adjust the PH) or using left over Alum disolved in water from the canning season to acidify the soil of the house plants. Before Baker I was buying so much stuff from Chevron/Ortho, and Rapid Gro, Virgo, and other such chemical fertilizer or insecticide vendors. Then again, I don't walk around my place with a badge on my shirt that states that I'm a "Master Gardener". I just don't take this stuff that seriously. In my orchard of 30 trees I've been buying "beneficial incects" which prey on pest insects. Lacewings, Trichogramma wasp, Lady Bugs, Praying Mantis, etc. I have bat boxes in the maple trees & Purple Martin boxes to keep those beneficial birds around my place so I don't have to use a fogger or any more chemicals than necessary. But thinking this way all goes back to my having read Jerry Baker's stuff.

Try the new to gardening forum. Lots of experienced gardeners answer all sorts of questions. Go to the forum and the at the bottom of the page, "search" for sprayer -- I'm pretty sure your question has already been answered. Here is a link that might be useful: New to Gardening GW forum.

I know you can make it yourself......I use a variation of the mix, that I find quite helpful. The operative ingredients are the beer and the sugar. My belief (although I do not know this) is that he's changed up the sugar source, because in the last few years I've listened to him, he's recommending molasses, rather than soda pop. More concentrated (thus cheaper) sugar. In any event, here's the recipe, as I use it, for an acre lot (your lot may be smaller, and you may want to wind down the sizes. Absolutely, precise measurement is not required). Into a five gallon paint bucket, I put: a. 4 or 5 cans of beer (and if I have any wine left over, I just pour in the wine). b. 4 litres soda pop (not diet: you want the sugar. FWIW, grape and strawberry have more sugar than cola). K-Mart's cheap 3 liter of soda is perfect. c. 2 gallons of household ammonia. d. 1/2 cup of cheap dish soap: the pink stuff off of KMart's shelves. Try your darndest to get one that does NOT say 'antibacterial'. e. A gallon of Gatorade (or whatever that big jug of it is, at the grocery store). Mix it all together, and run it through your hose-end sprayer (The weed B Gone sprayer is perfect for it) at 4oz. to the gallon. Spray everything to the point of runoff, (not drowning) and move along, spray something else. But spray the lawn, the flowers, the shrubs, everything. They'll all love it. The sugar is good for the little critters in the soil: they live on sugars, and you just gave them some. The beer has enzymes, which is how it got to be beer. These same enzymes (along with the sugar) operate to destroy thatch in the lawn. The ammonia is just nitrogen. A little snack for the lawn and leaves. The Gatorade provides 'trace nutrients', such as zinc, etc. Athletes need these nutrients, in small traces, and so do your plants and lawn. The dish soap makes everything else work well together, and destroys surface tension on the plant leaves, so the mixture is absorbed more easily. Unless you're a chemist: in that case, the dish soap is a 'surfactant', and makes everything work well. I spray my lawn about twice a year. Sometimes three times. It's not a HUGE amount of anything, and won't take the place of a regular fertilizer application. But for a little snack, for a little appetizer to keep the little critters in the lawn doing what they do best, I find it quite useful. As well as cheap.

Terrific Tomatoes (by the editors of Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine), Out in the Garden (Dean Riddle), A Starter Garden (Cheryl Merser), The Border Book (Anna Pavord) are books I have and are done with. I'd swap for mini rose cuttings (or rooted ones...); I am particularly fond of single minis and micro minis. Bigger roses, too, if they are single and have red or purple stamens (a la Dainty Bess or White Wings) will float my boat. Thanks for all.