Here are a few of the recent science fiction books I’ve been reading that I have enjoyed:

I liked the series above — although my only complaint is that I think they could have done a bit of editing and fit it into 3 books rather than 4 without losing any important material.

Fiction (action-thriller-drama):

Point of Impact was turned into a movie but did poorly. If you read the book, it becomes clear why doing a good movie would be tough (and why the movie did poorly).

We bought a Mantis 4-cycle tiller a few weeks ago. I used it last weekend to till our garden. It’s a crazy power-house.

But that’s not what I want to write about today. Instead, I want to briefly review and show off the Mantis dethatcher attachment.

We have about 1/2 acres of mowed grass (on a 5 acre lot). I installed the dethatcher attachment in about 2 minutes and the protective shields took another few minutes. After reading the brief instructions, which suggested I walk backwards for the best dethatching, I proceeded to the lawn to start the task. From start to finish, with raking and a brief 15-20 minute break, it took me about 4.5 hours to completely dethatch the lawn (and rake). I found after a while that it was much easier to pull the Mantis behind me instead of the recommended walking backwards (slightly awkward to get going the first time, but after that it wasn’t a big deal).

I was shocked by the amount of dead grass that it pulled from our lawn! Absolutely shocked! I had about 30 piles of raked dead grass around our lawn by the time I had completed the dethatching.

During my usage today, the Mantis used about 1 tank of gas (your mileage may vary … :) ).

I had read reports of the tines bending, but experienced none of that during my usage this morning. Our ground wasn’t terribly dry or wet this morning, so the tines weren’t forced to dig into mud nor were they forced to pound into a brick-like surface.

If you already own a Mantis — and interested in dethatching your lawn — you should definitely consider this attachment. We had a few landscapers quote a price for a professional job and they were nearly double the price of the attachment for a single visit.

I’d definitely recommend it without hesitation. I’m confident it did a better job than one of those drag behind style attachments you may have seen in your local garden store. Not only are there more tines, on the Mantis they spin rapidly and gently dig into the ground in a very tight formation rather than being widely spaced out like most are in the stores. The only downside really is that it’s not twice as wide. But, since you should only do this once or twice a year, it really isn’t that big of an issue. Also, they won’t take up much space in your garage when you’re not using them.

We bought the dethatcher from Amazon as they had it in stock, at a good price and we knew it would arrive promptly (which it did!).  (And if you buy this via Amazon via the link above, a tiny portion goes to supporting this web site, which I appreciate very much! Your price won’t change at all if you use my link.).