Katie, One of the things you need to start, and it's practically free, is a compost pile and begin to compost your yard as you go along. As you cut your lawn, set your lawnmower on its highest setting and let the grass clipping remain on the lawn. This is the first step to amending your soil, feeding the worms and building up your soil. As your begin weeding your lawn you have a few choices. I chose the more difficult route, weeding by hand, it's time consuming but in the long run easier on the soil and the health of the critters that grow there and work on your behalf. Using chemicals is a fast and easy way to kill a lot of stuff (weeds) quickly, but it's expensive and the drawbacks are sometimes significant. Instead I took each weed and threw it back onto the lawn and let it get 'mulched' by the lawn mower. The same thing for produce, fruits and vegetables from your kitchen. I built a compost pile in my backyard and put most of my kitchen waste into this pile. I avoid any meats, bones and dairy, it gets rancid quickly and stinks - don't put any in your compost pile. I water the pile lightly once or twice a week and I feel the heat, well over 120 degrees, generating from the pile. In a few weeks, sometimes months, I get good rich compost which smells like rich soil, and put it back on the lawn. Another thing I like to do is to feed the worms. 'Them thar critters' are the real saviors of my lawn, so I feed them. A few times a week I get some kitchen produce, say a banana peel and a few leaves of lettuce which aren't edible and I throw it in a blender, fill it halfway with water and throw the contents onto the lawn. Same thing for potatoes and most fruit. I blend it for at least 30 seconds and the worms love it. Now and then I throw on some corn meal, just as a treat. I've managed to tick off my wife and I take about two cups of rabbit food and run it through a coffee grinder a few times a week, making a nice powder which I throw on my lawn. My worms love it. I picked up a 25 lb bag at WalMart for $7 and it's lasted me a few months. During the fall, when my neighbors rake up their leaves, I collect a bunch of those bags and store them over the winter, taking care to pull out any branches. I spray a little water in there and this makes a heckuva leaf mulch to mow a bag or two into my lawn in late fall. By the time spring rolls around the soil is nicely amended and is overseed ready! If you've saved a few bags and made the leaf mulch, you can sprinkle it over the overseeded parts of the lawn and it will help germinate the seeds, giving a richer, thicker lawn. This approach is relatively inexpensive, the greatest cost to me was the black garbage bags I store the leaves in and then the space to store them. I got some old pallets to build the compost pile, free at my supermarket. Just don't forget to turn the pile about once a week to make a uniform compost pile. If you keep at it, this isn't as much work as it sounds. In my lawn I've also used some more exotic stuff, all organic, avoiding the N-P-K approach as too commercialized (promoted by the seed and fertilizer companies). Take your time, let the worms do most of the work...

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.

A waste of time and often money!! And potentially detrimental to plant health and soil quality. Honestly, it does depend on exactly what 'tonic' you are considering using -- some, like cayenne pepper, ARE moderately effective in discouraging critters like rabbits or deer. But none are the wonder products Baker would like you to believe they are. Sound, established gardening practices are always more desirable than homemade elixirs that promise to 'fix' everything. And many of his tonics could prove to be quite damaging if used excessively or incorrectly. btw, as far as I know, Jerry Baker is a self-proclaimed "expert" (debatable) and has no relationship with any Master Gardener program. In fact, I believe he has trademarked the title of "America's Master Gardener". IMO, he is nothing more than a slick salesman that has focused his attentions - very profitably - on America's passion for gardening.