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Baby shampoo, beer, and water...does this work?

17 years ago

I heard this works well on clay lawns to help break it down and add organic substance. My lawn is clay and we recently (early June) aereated the lawn, added soil/compost mixture, and over seeded (I know this is late, but had no choice). It has been a couple of weeks and the grass is showing progress. I had heard that this mixture works. If so, what does it do and what are the mixtures. Thanks!

dwhanc00

Comments (5)

okcdan
17 years ago
Well, adding the shampoo & the beer aren't really adding any organic materials (mulching your lawn clippings and the leaves in fall, plus topdressing with compost do add organic materials.) The baby shampoo acts as a surfactant & the beer provides enzymes, but to get a really detailed look at your ability to duplicate Nitron 35 along with it's ability to break down the "hard pan" like what you're wanting to do, check out this thread about Nitron A35 for quite a detailed & informative discussion and a formula to make your own "soup" mixture to acheive these benefits.

Good day, Dan
laurielilac
17 years ago
OKCDan, thank you for the thread to Nitron A35 which I found fascinating. Could this mixture in any way harm earthworms? Thank you. Laurie
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kerig01 - right now I put out roughly half an inch of water twice a week for a total of 1". One inch of water once a week might work better ... the water would penetrate deeper. I looked at the MSDS for Lunar, and it's using a non-ionic non-sudsing surfactant in a proprietary mix. It breaks up the surface tension and water soaks in faster where it is not subject to evaporation. Theirs may be a bit longer lasting, but you can get the same effect with any non-ionic surfactant ... AKA shampoo or dish detergent. Any non-oily, non-conditioning brand will work for you. The baby shampoo method is worth a try. If you have an automatic system, set it for several shorter periods that add up to the required quantity, with the start times so it can run through the cycle easily. I do 45 minutes every 10 days, and to prevent runoff it's in 3 sessions of 15 minutes each. By the time the cycle gets back to station 1, the previous dose of water has soaked in. Do the tuna can thing! Link is to how I worked out my schedule for watering my Buffalo grass - links in the article are to the "tuna can" method and a Phoenix lawn watering guide. There is probably a similar guide for your area. Here is a link that might be useful: Watering calculations
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No fertilizer this year....the main goal was to kill the moles and since I was a bit late I was suggested to wait till the next year to fertilize by a few people. For weeds I used Weed B Gone which killed most the weeds. I am still looking on how to kill clover which it did a poor job on killing. Was told it is hard to kill off. Total bottles used is 4 1 bottle for front and 1 for the back over a 2 month period. I used a 20 gallon sprayer @ 2oz setting as this yard was very poorly kept for many years (more dandelions then grass)
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Here's a quote from Texas-Weed: "You have to be extremely careful what kind of soap, in fact not soap at all as most dish soap has anti-bacterial agents and de-greasers in it which is a recipe for dead grass. Several years ago when my youngest Son was going to college at OSU, he did a gas Chromatigraph on a product called Nitron A-35. What he found is it is flat stale dark beer, baby shampoo, and an enzyme found in human saliva. So we came up with a recipe that closely matched it. 1 bottle of stale dark beer. Open it up and let it sit out a few days. 1 cup of spit. 1 3-0unce travel bottle of Sauve or Johnson's tearless baby shampoo. Place in a hose end sprayer and set dial to 1 TBLSP per gallon." This post made we re-think using Dawn dish soap due to its degreasing properties. That's why I made mention of using something along the lines of "Seventh generation" dish soap or just sticking with the baby shampoo.
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Not a beer shampoo but I remember my mom using beer as a 'setting solution' when she put her hair up in rollers. She had scarlet fever as young teen and lost all her hair and it grew back in very sparse and finely textured. The hops and malts in the beer contain proteins that coat and help strengthen and rebuild damaged hair and provide body. It seemed to work very well for her and you never noticed a beery scent.....but that might have been disguised by her hairspray (which was liberally applied!) I should make it clear that this was in the days before all the myriad hair products we have now :-) And I have never tried this myself! I do remember using hydrogen peroxide and Ivory soap flakes to bleach my hair (just parts....not my whole head) when I was a teenager.
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Billl
17 years ago
Are you reading Jerry Baker by chance?

Anyway, baby shampoo, beer and water have virtually no organic material in them (considering how big of an area you are going to apply them over.) The beer has a little sugar and alcohol but not much else. The water is ....well, just water. Your lawn obviously needs that. The baby shampoo is a soap and will help break surface tension so water absorbs more readily. In that sense it will help the soil, but the effects are short lived, so you would need to reapply regularly.

Frankly, I suggest you just adjust your watering practices to make sure you are deeply watering the clay. It isn't as easy as it sounds. If you just let the sprinklers run untill water pools, you probably only wet the first inch of soil. The trick to getting the water farther down is to water for a while, let it soak in, water some more, let it soak in etc. Do this until the ground absorbs at least an inch of water. (you can set an empty tuna can out as a measuring guage) It is amazing how much clay improves once you get it hydrated.
dwhanc00
Original Author
17 years ago
okcdan and bill, thanks for the response! So this will not slow down the germinating process of the new grass? Also, I have quite a bit of clover showing up in the yard, will it hurt the new grass to spray weed be gone?
Billl
17 years ago
Beer and soap won't hurt new grass - herbicides will. Read the instructions on the product you intend to use, but most should not be applied untill the new grass has been mowed 3-4 times.

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