This is what I had in mind for use on my patio/breezeway area for the Spring/Summer months. I found an old Baker's rack at Habitat resale store for only $25, which was a steal but we didn't have the truck with us, nor do we have storage for it until we can use it, so I didn't buy it. I know I'm probably going to kick myself over and over for not buying it. Come Summertime, I'm hiring a handyman to make me some more storage cabinets for my seed sowing supplies, my husband's power tools, and some other things. Hopefully I will have more room to store stuff then. I also wanted to use it like you did but also be able to add some small potted plants in the Spring/Summer months.

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.

Jerry Baker still lives. Funny isn't it? For a second Thursday, which is one of my 2 watering days by city rule, I sprayed my dry, thatchy 1,000sf front lawn with water, and a 50/50 mix of grape soda (grape soda is about the highest in sugar that you can get, and it's less than 70 cents for a 2-liter at "Wally World".), lemon ammonia, and a little Murphy's Oil Soap thrown in for softening and wetting. 2 weeks of that, and the grass is nicely green, NOT necessarily like a lush dark green swath of carpet, but not bad at all, considering-- also, most of the thatch is pretty much gone. I started playing with Jerry Baker's advice, formulas, and ideas about 5 years ago, snapping up every one of his books that I came across in area thrift stores. My front "lawn", in those days was, literally, a 1000sf Florida sandbox. It's come a long, LONG way since, thanks mostly to the late Mr. Baker, and it's been a heck of a lot of fun besides. A real kick for that little "mad chemist" wannabe in me. If you read Baker's stuff, you will find out that, in the early days, he was just about as big into "hard-core" chemical use as anybody. Gradually, his tone and his advice changed into a whole variety of the quirky formulas made from household items that are still going 'round and 'round, and are STILL bickered over regularly by both the chem-chumps and the organically-inclined. Baker didn't live to see much but the beginnings of our latest "green revolution". He probably would have welcomed it to an extent, but then again. . . Gradually, Baker dropped the worst and most expendable of the chemicals. I don't know specifically what it was that precipitated his personal revolution-- however, in the process, he obviously found himself a niche full of (maybe slightly nutty) do-it-yourselfers like himself, and gently guided, fed and nurtured a whole lot of folks with gardening insecurities-- like myself. Call it whooey. if you want. Baker himself certainly doesn't care at this point. Meanwhile, my own lawn is still far, FAR from perfect. Still, of those in my neighborhood, it isn't bad at all, hardly the worst to be seen. It mostly grows nicely, and a good bit of green, which may or may not be mostly bermuda grass, and nearly the entire 1000 sf is covered. Further, it holds up pretty well despite 2-3 years of drought lately. All this with little more that some as much peat as I could afford to thrown at it, a little sulphur for further pH lowering ( because it started at over a 7), some once/twice a year amendments (amounting to roughly a dozen bags TOTAL of peat, topsoil, and composted manure). I WAS putting on as much as 20# of seed a year --could have used less, and had a lot more of it germinate maybe, AFTER a couple ton of amendments were rototilled in from , but I couldn't afford that. Other than the above improvements, I used and still use some version of Jerry Baker's watering tonics for at least one of the 2 waterings a week that I am allowed. Last time I did any digging in my front lawn, I even found myself with a few genuine, live. wriggling EARTHWORMS trying to escape my excavation. Pretty cool, that, since the critters might as well have been a top endangered species when I first started working out there. The entire front yard was just that dead. COULD IT HAVE BEEN DONE much faster, much easier, and with a whole lot more money spent on it? Sure! Absofreakinlutely. I could have just thrown down a bunch of St. Aug sod, and replaced it every few years when the inch of soil it comes with croaked from exhaustion, but hey-- where's the fun in that??

As you become a well seasoned gardener, you'll find that Jerry's recipes and advice are based on good thought with a lot of hokus pokus mixed in. My assessment is from reading about half of his stuff. Much of his advice works well, some just makes you feel good. And of course he presents his findings as if he invented them all. I have really found nothing that can hurt except this: Don't use so much soap! This weekly washing of your yard with a soap solution is bad. Soap can work on breaking down the cuticle layer that protects leaves from dessication. Use it to kill bugs, as a surfactant (spreader/sticker) for natural and chemical pesticides, but not for a simple periodic washdown. Rick P.S. I do have a B.S. degree in horticulture, and have been working in its various facets for 25 years.