Weeds can be a homeowner's worst nightmare, quickly taking over your lawn and garden and ruining all the time and hard work that you put into maintaining your lawn. But with the right knowledge and a little bit of effort, you can effectively rid your lawn of weeds and stop them from spreading any further.
How to Stop Weeds From Spreading
Though there are many ways you get rid of weeds, the best way to do it is to prevent them from growing in the first place.
Mow Your Lawn Regularly
Ensuring that you mow your lawn regularly is an easy first step to preventing weeds from taking over your yard. Weeds thrive in long, unkempt lawns so keeping your grass well-manicured and at the proper height will make it much harder for weeds to take root and grow in the first place.
Weed Prevention for New Sod
If you are laying new sod in your yard, there are a few other things you can do to prevent weeds from growing.
First, when installing your sod, make sure that there aren’t any gaps between each piece. The more gaps there are, the more likely weeds will start growing in them, so installing your sod properly is very important.
Using Pre-Emergent Herbicides
The most effective way to prevent weeds from growing in the first place is to use pre-emergent herbicides like quinclorac or prodiamine. Both of these herbicides can be applied to your lawn to prevent weeds like crabgrass (watergrass, barnyard grass, or quackgrass) from ever taking root and saving you a lot of unnecessary yard work down the road.
Mulch Your Garden
It's not uncommon for weeds to spread from your garden to your lawn, so keeping your garden in tip-top shape is also very important if you want to stop them from spreading.
Mulching your garden is the easiest way to prevent weeds from taking root or spreading. Freshly applied mulch crushes and suffocates the weeds and seeds under them, killing weeds that have already taken root and preventing new ones from growing.
How to Get Rid of Weeds
Though weed prevention is the easiest way to keep your lawn looking its best, if weeds have already taken root in your lawn, there are still plenty of thing on our blog that you can do to get rid of them.
Pull Weeds by Hand
Though it may require a bit of back-bending labor, if you only have a small number of weeds in your yard, pulling them by hand is the best way to get rid of them.
The most important thing to remember when pulling weeds is that you need to get as much of the root as possible. If you don’t pull out the root itself, the weed will simply grow back again in a few days, so make sure you get as much of the root as possible.
Use Post-Emergent Herbicides
Similar to pre-emergent herbicides, post-emergent herbicides can be used to get rid of weeds once they have already taken root. Most hardware stores and garden centers have tons of different products that can easily be applied via a spray bottle or with a fertilizer spreader and will kill most, if not all, the weeds in your yard with ease.
Grass Type Weeds
Crabgrass is a very active grass type weed that germinates starting in June and lasting throughout the fall. Crabgrass is an aggressive annual found in the soil of every state, it will die in the fall, but is ugly until the first frost kills it. Preemergent applied in June can help prevent it from germinating, even on new sod.
Quackgrass is the most devastating and hard to remove grass type weed. It is the cancer of lawn weeds. If it is allowed to spread, it will take over your yard. The only way to remove this weed is to spray your whole lawn with Glyphosate (Round-up) and start over. Pre Emergent herbicides can help prevent this weed from starting in your lawn. If caught early Quackgrass may be eliminated with spot treatments of roundup.
Broadleaf Type Weeds
BroadLeaf type weeds like dandelions and morning glory, are much easier to remove. An application of a 2-4-D chemical can reduce or eliminate these types of weeds.