[Rick TYler]

I hate to give out my favorite fund raiser, but then I realized that, hey!, none of you live in Redmond or Sammamish so we should be safe...

Our robotics team hasn't used this yet, but my son's Boy Scout troop has. All figures are typical of this area.

We aerate lawns in the spring. A lawn aerator is like an oversized lawn mower that punches hundreds of holes in a lawn, tearing up the thatch and letting water and nutrients into the soil. If you've seen a lawn covered by little mud cylinders, it has just been aerated.

The minimum cost to rent an aerating machine is around $60 for a couple of hours, and then the homeowner has to lift a big, heavy (100 pounds or so), dirty machine in and out of their SUV, van or truck and drive it home, use it, and then return it.

We can rent a lawn aerating machine for around $120 for the whole weekend. The rental place provides a trailer which we fill with six aerating machines. We take teams of one parent and one Scout around town and drop them off in different neighborhoods with an aerator, sack lunch, bottled water, and an enthusiastic attitude. We take the machine door-to-door and offer to aerate people's lawns for them. We charge a minimum of $40 for a smallish lawn (still less than that $60, you'll note) and as much as $100 for one of those riding-mower lawns. I believe someone once paid my son $120 for a really big lawn.

Our average take is $400 per day per person profit. My son has been to Boy Scout high adventure bases in Florida and Minnesota and had money left over.

This only works in the spring and fall, when most people want their lawns aerated. A lot of professional lawn services do this, too, so you want to make sure you get there first. Some volunteer groups that do this go around in advance and get people to reserve a time and day. This gives you an idea of demand and income.

Other advice. Neighborhoods with big houses are bad because they all have professional gardeners. Really low-income neighborhoods don't work because they don't have the money. You want to find plain old middle-class neighborhoods. Anyone flying an American flag will hire a Boy Scout (don't know about robotics team high schoolers yet), as will most with a Republican bumper sticker on their car. Homes with big SUVs or minivans are good, too. They probably have kids of their own.

It's genuinely hard work, but that's what teenagers are for, right?