De-Thatching

This spring we decided to dethatch the lawn.  Thatch is the build-up of dead grass within the lawn.  It doesn’t allow air and water to get to the roots and just makes the lawn look ugly. 

We’ve lived in the house 9 years and have never dethatched before. Our first year, the lawn was in pretty bad shape. We did our best on our own, but then had to get a lawn service to really get it back in shape. Over the years I’ve had plenty of neighbors stop by and say how nice our lawn is. But this past winter was particularly hard on our lawn and we had a lot of thatch and patches of dead grass all over.

We rented a Power Rake from our local rental store and with a $5 coupon we got it for $27 (tax included) for 2 hours.  It takes just a little longer than mowing your grass, so 2 hours was plenty of time for us. 

The first thing you have to do is cut the grass at least once.  Raise the tines of the Power Rake all the way up, then try it out and drop it down as needed so it is only raking up the thatch, and not all the grass and dirt too.

We had ours almost all the way up and it was perfect for our lawn. This thing isn’t self-propelled like the lawn mower, so Jamie did the dethatching. The first pass was amazing and almost embarrassing!  Look at all that thatch!

Next up is getting rid of all the thatch.  You could rake it all up, but talk about getting a blister!  So I attached the collector bag to our lawn mower, set it up all the way and used the mower like a vacuum.  It worked great, but I could only do one pass before the bag was full and I had to dump it out.

Like my use of safety glasses?!? It was windy and thatch in my eyes was not pleasant.  After all the thatch was removed the grass looked a bit dull and there were some really bad patches where we had to re-seed the lawn.  I re-seeded a few years ago with some good results so I used the same formula this time. 

You’ll need topsoil (cheap stuff is fine, I picked mine up for $1/bag), MiracleGro garden soil, peat moss, and grass seed (7lb bag was just enough to patch our lawn). 

I mixed one bag of topsoil, 1/4 of the MircleGro soil, 1/8 of the peat moss and 1/4 of the seed in a wheelbarrow.  I had to repeat this 3 times to cover all the patches in our lawn.

First break up the soil a bit where you want to re-seed (I used a small hand rake) and then put down the soil/seed mix.  After you have all your areas filled in cover them with a thin layer of peat moss.  This will help keep the area moist and keep birds from eating the seed.  Gently water the areas and keep watering every day until grass is starting to establish. 

It’s been three weeks and our lawn is looking better than ever.  We do still use a lawn service and I made sure to let them know we were dethatching before they treated for the first time.  The areas we patched are filling in nicely, although not entirely yet. 

If you are wondering what we did with all our bags of thatch, I have a co-worker that has a lot of land and she took it home for her compost.  I highly recommend finding someone to take it for compost, because it won’t ever decompose in a landfill. 

Germany

Jamie and I took our first trip to Germany, which was also our first trip to Europe.  We went to visit Jamie’s good friend Brian who married his sister’s High school foreign exchange student, Eva. They’ve known each other for 15 years, but she’s from Germany and so he took the leap and moved there to be with her 2 1/2 years ago. 

I took a lot more pictures than I realized, so I’ll just show you here the best of the best.

Brian & Eva live in Monchengladbach (don’t worry, I can’t pronounce it either).  After arriving at their house, Brian took us to a corner bakery and butcher shop.  Then we headed to the city center and we had our first German beer and Jamie learned that he likes Alt. Near their house is a community garden which is separated out by plots and the neighboring apartment dwellers take care of their plots.  I was assuming a vegetable garden, but these were much more than that.

This stone is a weather station.  It’s in German, but from what Eva translated it is very tongue in cheek.  For example, if the stone is wet, it is raining; if you can’t see the stone, it is foggy; if the stone has snow in it, it is snowing; etc… you get the picture.

They live close to Dusseldorf and we took a day to walk around and see the city.  They had some of the nicest outside restaurants.  They also had these weird trees that looked like they were upside down.  Jamie and I also had a shot of Killepitsch which tasted quite strong. 

We also visited Cologne (Koln) which I learned from Wikipedia was 95% destroyed in WWII and then rebuilt.  However, there is a cathedral that is still original and so amazing.  They have a very busy shopping street that was packed on Saturday, because all the stores are closed on Sundays.  They are also home to the chocolate museum (yum) where they actually make chocolate and I was able to customize my very own chocolate bar.

We had ice cream (gelato) almost every day and one of the last days we had some fancy ice cream creations. 

We finished our week with dinner at the TV tower in Dusseldorf which has a rotating restaurant with an amazing view of the city.  Unfortunately, it was cloudy, but we still enjoyed the sights and the company of our wonderful friends.

We are so grateful that we were able to take this trip together. Our family was incredibly awesome to take care of the little guy while we were away and knowing he was with them made our trip all the better.  We hope to return again in a few years.

Homemade Laundry Detergent

Last November we were running out of laundry detergent and I had seen on Pinterest a DIY Laundry Detergent recipe.  We already use the powder version of Tide detergent which is cheaper than the liquid and this is supposedly cheaper and better than name brand so I thought I would give it a go. 

I found everything I needed at Wal-Mart which included Washing Soda ($3.24), Baking Soda ($2.12), Borax ($3.38), OxyClean ($7.52), Fels Naptha soap (2x $0.97), Purex fabric softener crystals ($4.76) and a new Rubbermaid container ($3.97) to mix it all in.  In total, this all cost me $26.93.

I followed the directions and I would say the most time consuming part was grating the soap.  I tried a cheese grater and also a lemon zester, and I found the lemon zester was a little easier, but still a pain.  I layered a little of each ingredient in the Rubbermaid and then mixed it as best I could. 

It says you only need about 1-2 tbsp per load, but I think we were using more than that.  She states that this would only cost you $28/year based on 6 loads of laundry per week.  I would say we do between 6-8 loads per week.  We used up the last of our homemade detergent this week, so it only lasted us 4 months, not 12 like she states.  That means we must be using closer to 3x the amount of detergent needed. 

While it did seem to wash our clothes just as well as the name brands, I think I’ll be going back to Tide, since it is more convenient and not much more expensive at our current rate of usage.  And besides, these companies spend lots of money on perfecting their product.  If this was a more “green” laundry detergent then I might consider using it again, but with the ingredients listed, I don’t think that it is. 

MOMmy & DADdy

Just this week Jacob has gone from calling us Mommy & Daddy to just Mom & Dad.  I’m not sure why the change happened and I’m also not sure I like it!  I guess our little guy is growing up…

The long way

My manager and I were recently in the Boston area to do some research and finish out a trial from which we recorded over 2,000 numbers.  We finished early and made it to the airport with 3 hours to kill before our flight, so I decided to start averaging the numbers to see how the results turned out. 

I always keep my TI-30x calculator handy while traveling so I started crunching the numbers.  I was able to get a third of them calculated before the flight and even made a hand-drawn graph to show my manager the results.  I did have my laptop with me, but it would have taken me longer to try and input all the numbers without a number pad. 

We then boarded the plane and while everyone was finding their seats and the flight attendants were showing everyone what to do in case of an emergency I pulled out my calculator to keep going.  But then came the announcement of turning off all electronic devices.  I was not sure if my calculator was included, but it is an electronic device and I didn’t want to be THAT person on the plane.

I still really wanted to keep averaging, so I decided to start doing it with my pencil and paper.  The adding was easy enough, but then came the long division.  I tried to think how many years it had been since I had to do long division and then I realized it had been decades!  Oh boy, this might take a while. 

But actually it was quite easy and I remembered what I was doing fairly quickly.  It was just like riding a bicycle.  Once the electronic devices were allowed to be turned back on I did pull out my calculator and check my math.  I would say that I was about 75% correct.  I erased my math after each set, so I wasn’t sure if the wrong ones were off because of the adding or division.

I guess I’m all set for when Jake brings home his math homework in a few years.  Jamie and I were both able to pick up math very easily, so I really hope Jake will too. 

Bridal Shower Cookbook

For my co-worker's bridal shower we asked for a recipe from each of the guests.  My plan was to make a scrapbook out of them and give it to her as a gift.  In the end though I decided that would be too much work, so I made a cookbook using a photobook on shutterfly.com.

It took me a while to understand the layouts and how to make my own, but after a few hours it was complete.  I think it turned out great! 

Click here to view this photo book larger

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Easy Baked Cod & Homemade Tartar Sauce

I came across an easy recipe for baked cod and decided to give it a try.  It was quite tasty, but I made a few simple additions and it was even better.

Ingredients:

4 cod filets, thawed
1/2 cup flour
2 eggs
1/4 cup milk
15 Ritz crackers
1 tsp Penzy's Northwoods seasoning

Directions:

• Sprinkle flour onto a small plate.
• Mix eggs and milk and pour into a shallow bowl.
• Crush Ritz crackers and combine with Northwoods seasoning.  Spread onto a small plate.
• Pat dry each cod fillet.  One fillet at a time, press into flour to coat well, then drench into egg/milk mixture and then press into crushed crackers to coat well.  Continue with other fillets.
• Bake at 400 F for 20 minutes or until they flake easily with a fork.

I also recently made homemade tartar sauce which was way better than store bought.  The only downside is that it only keeps for 3 days, so modify as needed to make less.

1 cup Mayonnaise
1 tbsp pickle relish (or finely chopped pickles)
1 tbsp minced onion
1-2 tbsp lemon juice
salt & pepper

Mix mayo, pickles and minced onion together in a small bowl. Add lemon juice and salt & pepper to taste. Refrigerate for 1 hour before serving.

Enjoy!