Hate Your Weeds, Love Your Lawn

With the spring and summer seasons also comes a time of growth. Flowers are blooming, trees leaf and lawns thicken. The only problem is that with those beautiful changes is nature believes in equal-opportunity for growth and survival of the fittest. In order to get our outdoor spaces looking amazing, we need to start working on giving our desired plants an advantage over our un-welcomed guests.

Chemicals aren’t necessary to combat these trespassers. We have several ways to help give your weeds a disadvantage without having to use herbicides.

• Pull them. Yes, pull them out by hand. The best way to fight off weeds is to get as deep into the soil as you can and yank them out. For an example, dandelions. The trick is to get them while their young because – like many leaf weeds – they will grow deep roots that will be much harder to pull out once they are mature.
• Choke them. Block out the sun and oxygen goes a long way towards killing and preventing new growth. Use a thick layer of newspaper and lay it over your weeds. Then cover the newspaper with at least an inch of mulch. If those pesky weeds start poking through, repeat the process: more newspaper, more mulch.
• Shrivel them. Two great ways to kills weeds are boiling water and vinegar. Scalding weeds with hot water damages their ability to absorb nutrients from the sun which causes them to starve. Vinegar is a desiccant which means it dries out the thirsty weed. If you use vinegar you need to be very careful it doesn’t touch any of you wanted plants. Temporarily cover them with a few plastic bags to be safe.
• Crowd them. The greatest defense against weeds are healthy desired plants. Make sure you follow a fertilizing schedule you can find on the bottle for best results. Having healthy grass, plants and vegetables will dominate and give weeds less room to take over.

Now go show those weeds who’s boss.