Weeds come, and weeds go. Figuring out how to get rid of weeds in your lawn often requires a bit of trial and error. Fortunately, you can take some tips from the internet and find some reliable solutions for getting rid of these pesky plant pests.
This article will detail some of the most important tricks for anyone wondering how to get rid of weeds in a lawn. From chemical weed killers to natural alternatives and labor-intensive weed killing, we’ll discuss all of the most popular weed-killing options.
How to Get Rid of Weeds In Your Lawn
These are the most popular and reliable options.
Pluck ‘Em
There are a few ways that you can pluck weeds from the dirt they grew up in. Plucking weeds is only worthwhile if the weeds are big enough to pull, and only if there aren’t too many.
- You can pluck by hand. Simply throw on a pair of gloves and begin to uproot your weeds. Make sure to pull out the whole root.
- You can pluck with tools. A small spade is useful for helping to get weeds out by the root. A hoe can be useful for working with bigger weeds.
Spray ‘Em
The next best solution is spraying your weeds, which can be done with either a synthetic or natural product.
Synthetic Solutions
Synthetic weed killers are products filled with herbicides, i.e. chemicals that kill plants. Although these products are effective, more and more studies are revealing the dangers of synthetic solutions and the risks they pose to humans, animals and the natural environment.
Natural Solutions
It’s also certainly possible to kill weeds using natural solutions, such as vinegar. If you’re going to be using vinegar to kill your weeds, make sure that you look around for some stuff that’s stronger than food-grade vinegar. Food-grade vinegar has no more than 5% acetic acid; you’ll want something in the 10-20% range. Even at this concentration, vinegar tends to only kill weeds during the first couple weeks of their lives.
Prevent ‘Em
The best way to get rid of weeds is to not have them growing in the first place! Or at least make it very difficult for them to thrive.
- Keep your grass cut short. This prevents weeds from going to seed and prevents them from developing large leaves, which absorb more sunlight and encourage plant growth.
- Keep your lawn watered just enough. Lawns don’t need much more than an inch of water, including rainfall, on a weekly basis.
- Balance your soil’s pH. Grass likes a pH of 6.5 and so this is the ideal pH level for your lawn.
- Keep your lawn healthy by using products like Root Maximizer and EM-1, which encourage grass growth but don’t support weeds.
- Hand-weed bigger, stronger weeds. A weed-killing product might not fully kill something strong like a big dandelion, so you might as well uproot the entire thing to be sure.
These prevention tips, combined with spraying and manual labor, will help to ensure that you don’t experience problems with weeds.
