Options for Weed Control

There are safe and effective ways to weed your lawn and garden. You don’t even have to buy that nasty toxic chemical weed killer.

There are approximately three different ways to get rid of a plant. You can pluck it out or dig it out using your hands or a shovel, you could use poisons to kill the plant, or you can take a more preemptive approach and use a pre-emergent.

Each different approach to weeding has its own pros and cons, so it is hard to say which is best and most effective. Many times it is going to depend specifically on the type of plant you are trying to get rid of.

Pull Weeds by Hand

Pulling weeds by hand is very effective for some different plants, but then again for other plants this may not work at all. Dandelions are a popular weed just about everywhere on the planet.

The problem with these is that they have very brittle twelve inch tap roots. Tap roots are common in a lot of different genus of plants, and they are usually long stems that extend into the ground with smaller stems that sprout laterally underground.

The problem with tap roots is they detach from the flower of the plant because they are so flimsy, and then the root can just start to sprout a new flower all over again. This is why you haven’t been able to kill your dandelions by pulling them with your hands.

Chemicals

The next option is chemical weed killer. There are a lot of different substances that are going to kill a weed when contact is made, but among the many different types there are two main categories; organic and inorganic.

Inorganic Weed Control

Generally the inorganic is going to infect the tissue of the plant and kill the whole plant, and the organic may only kill whatever part of the plant it came in contact with. Using inorganic weed killers on your lawn may leave big areas of dead grass.

Organic Weed Control

Using organic weed killers, such as vinegar, may result in the same problem as trying to pull the weed by hand, because you aren’t getting to the root. Then the pre-emergent option is only good if you don’t have weeds and you are trying to protect from them.

Best Option?

So what you want to do is combine all three methods to get a good protection from weeds in your lawn. First wet the soil so when you pull the weeds you get as much of the root as you can.

Liberally pour vinegar in the weed hole left behind so to soak the remaining weed left in the ground. Then use corn gluten to protect the soil from any future weeds from taking seed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Weed and Pest Control. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.