Lucky I guess....
last year
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Lawns and the 2014 California drought
Comments (6)15 minutes twice per week is not enough water for anything in the garden to survive. What corner of hell do you live in? Please be specific. Fescue might not be the right grass or it might be the only grass. Need to know where you are. Can you use soaker hoses, buckets, or hand-held devices to water outside of the 15-minute window? I'm in San Antonio where we are limited to watering one day per week, but we have 7 hours available to us. In some neighborhoods we can use soakers any time of the week. Toward the end of last summer we were restricted to one day every other week but for the same 7 hours. That was enough time if your soil was prepared for it. If you had any runoff at all, then you were going to have a dead lawn. One thing that will help is compost on the lawn. I'm not big on compost but this is one situation where it can help to provide a micro-mulching effect that should conserve moisture. The application rate for compost is 1 cubic yard per 1,000 square feet. Another thing that will help water penetrate deeper into your soil is shampoo. I know, sounds crazy. And I know people here on this forum that fight the notion of putting shampoo on the lawn, but all they have to do is try it. The universities will tell you it doesn't work, but they turn around and use a very similar chemical to make their RoundUp work, so I don't get it. The application rate is at least 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. That means if you have 3,000 square feet of grass, then put at least 9 ounces of any clear shampoo into a hose end sprayer. I like to dilute it with plenty of water to make this flow easier. Spray it at any dial rate, as evenly as you can, until the spray bottle is empty. The amount of dilution makes no difference - just get the stuff on the soil. Then follow that spray job up with a full inch of water (while you can). Use cat food or tuna cans to measure 1 inch. A week after you spray the shampoo, water another full inch. Two weeks later, repeat the shampoo and inch of water. That is all you need. If you really want to go crazy, one of the gurus on another forum spray his yard every week with the equivalent of 50 ounces per 1,000. He was trying to soften his soil very deeply. Don't know how that worked but the report is that the heavy soap treatment did not harm the lawn, so we learn a little bit every time someone tries something. Another one of the gurus on that forum posted a picture where a limb had fallen from a tree and embedded itself 27 inches deep into his soil...after he had been using the shampoo. At first I thought it was a bunch of hooey until the tree incident. Then I tried it. That was 2 years ago and my soil still gets very soft when I water it. It is so soft you have to be careful not to turn your ankle when you walk on it. I'm talkin' soft! Then when it dries out it gets hard again. And then soft when I water, so it's back to being normal soil. This shampoo treatment, by the way, takes the place of core aeration if you had been thinking of doing that. Shampoo actually works (all the time??) where core aeration seldom works to soften the soil. There are many (MANY) alternatives to having grass. If this is a one-year thing, mulching the lawn area is a perfect alternative. Find a tree trimmer with one of those pull behind chipper shredders and see if they will dump a load on your lawn. 3 inches of mulch will keep your underlying soil as healthy as it can be while everyone else's soil dries out and becomes unhealthy. Then next year when the rains return, you can pull back the mulch and sod or seed immediately. Mulch really does cure all the ills of the soil. Other alternatives are more permanent. Let us know if you might want to do something else. Also, how many square feet or acres are you talking about?...See MoreGarage Door Exhaust Port
Comments (2)How about going to a woodworking store, and getting a 'dust collection blast gate'? It is used for vacuum systems where you can direct the suction to one or two devices at a time instead of losing suction over all of one's powertools at once. Rockler woodworking stores have them. I don't know if the following link will work, but I went to Rockler.com and did a search on 'blast gate'. http://www.rockler.com/search_results.cfm?filter=blast+gate&submit.x=21&submit.y=6...See Morecompromised credit card
Comments (23)Has happened to me, too. One time I ordered something from a small store in another state. I have a feeling they were not sophisticated enough to protect their database of credit card numbers. It was shortly after that that I found that two laptop computers had been ordered using my card. Another time my son found a $15,000 charge on his card. He just happened to check his account online. He called the credit card company but they said there was nothing they could do about the purchase, although he would not be responsible for the cost. The charge has been made to a large lighting company in another state. My son, out of the goodness of his heart, called the company and informed them of the scam. They were so grateful! The order was sitting n their loading dock waiting to be picked up and they were able to stop it from leaving the warehouse. They would have been stuck with the cost. What a world we live in. I'd call the police and let them know about the spa, although, who knows, maybe there is some rotten apple at the credit card company....See MoreSummertime Blues
Comments (4)A fan won't help me, unfortunately SWM. It's the temperatures that get me, and a fan in the heat doesn't help me at all. It just moves the hot air around, but I'm still hot. I've learned to live with it. When all the northern states are under inches and feet of snow, I'm walking around in my shirt sleeves and flip flops, so there is an up side. I'm seriously considering starting my African Violet collection again. It gives me something to do in the summer when I can't go outside much. At one time, I used to sell them on eBay, but I just grow a few for fun now. They are so addictive, though!...See More- last year
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