SOMETIMES THE PROBLEMS WITH WEEDS ARE AS MUCH A FUNCION OF ONE'S ATTITUDE ABOUT WEEDS AS IT IS ABOUT THE PLANTS THEMSELVES!

Americans waste an awful lot of time and money fighting the weeds in their lawn. All that annual angst over which herbicide to try each year can be replaced with one very important weed control step – overseeding the lawn one or two years in a row. Herbicides do kill weeds. What homeonwers don’t appreciate apparently is that when you kill a weed you leave a hole, a space in the dirt. Some folks think that if I add some fertilizer at the same time I kill the weeds, the grass will reproduce and fill that hole. That is not generally true. Another weed is more likely to fill that hole, giving you another reason to use herbicide again next year.

A dense turf mowed at 2 or 2 1/2 inches all season long will allow few weeds to ever develop. You can’t get a thick lawn from fertilizing. You must add more seed, more plants. Thick grass (about 9 to 12 plants per square inch, about what new sod looks like) leaves little space for weed seeds to germinate.

Tall grass that is dense allows little light to get to the soil level blanking out the light that is needed for weed seeds to germinate. So overseeding is your best weed control in the long run. Let’s look at the two most notorious lawn weeds, the dandelion and crabgrass to demonstrate the value of overseeding.

Evaluate The Percentage Of Weeds In The Lawn
Making the decision about which strategy you need to use to deal with weeds in the lawn is controlled by the percentage of your lawn made up of weeds. If your lawn has less than 15 to 20% of the area occupied by weeds, you can often gain control simply by overseeding the lawn to get it more dense and by raising the lawn mower to 2 ½ inches or higher.

If your lawn has weeds making up 20 to 50%, you will need to first kill the weeds with a selective herbicide and then overseed to fill in the holes created by the dead weeds. See the file overseeding the lawn.

Finally, if your lawn consists of more than 50% weeds, then your grass is so stressed it is not worth trying to keep. In this instance you kill the whole lawn with a non-selective herbicide and either overseed or perform a complete renovation. There are files for “Renovating With Seed” and “Renovating With Sod”.