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Lawn Care - How to Weed Effectively!

By Terry Blackburn

This is one lawn care chore that most people cannot stand. Getting down on the ground and pulling out weeds may not be your idea of a swell time, but it is necessary and will help keep your lawn looking its best.

Weeds, like all plants, need sunlight, soil, nutrients, and time to grow. Unfortunately, weeds do not know how to play fair and want the lawn all to themselves. Even after you have used landscape fabric, you may still have weeds.

You will also see weeds on the rest of your lawn as well. While mowing can help, it will not get down to the root of the problem. This is where you will need to get down on the ground and start pulling weeds up by, you guessed, it, their roots.

When weeding, you should:

Wear gloves, hat, and a long sleeve shirt to protect yourself from the sun and from poisonous plants you may find.

Bring a plastic bag with you to put the weeds into. If you leave them on the lawn, the seeds from them will repopulate the lawn.

Pull the weed put by its roots. If you only pull the top of the weed out, it will regenerate and grow again.

If a weed is difficult to remove you may have to dig a little and then remove it again.

Try to cover the entire lawn an hour or two.

Since weeding is such a boring activity, many people will try to coax their children or the neighborhood children by offering them a little money for their effort. While this is fine, you should explain how to weed effectively or that five dollars you gave away will be for nothing. If there are no children available, you should try to weed once a week in order to stay ahead of the new growth. An hour here and there is better than five or six hours in one setting.

Tips on how to make weeding a little easier:

Water the soil prior to weeding
Weed in the late afternoon or early morning
Use a small trowel for tough weeds
Try to weed before the weeds get too big
 

Here is a list of what NOT to do with your big bag of weeds after you have collected them:

Use them as mulch as this will simply spread seeds around defeating the purpose of weeding in the first place.

Burn the weeds because they may be poisonous which could cause more damage if inhaled.

Put them into the compost pile. Same issue as with mulching.

Eat them, as they may not taste that good or be healthy for you.

Place them in the trash can inside the house as you may have collected small insects that could infest your home.

What you should do is place your weeds into an outside trash can.

Now that you know how to remove weeds, reduce the number of weeds, and dispose of weeds, get out there and start weeding.

Terry Blackburn. Internet Marketing Consultant, living in South Shields in the North-East of England. Author and Producer of blog http://www.lawnsurgeon.blogspot.com. Author of "Your Perfect Lawn," a 90 Page eBook devoted to Lawn Preparation, Lawn Care and Maintenance. Find it at http://www.lawnsurgeon.com

I would be very interested to have your comments on this Article.

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