Fighting the Weeds War: The Struggle for a Good Lawn

No matter how much you work on your yard each year to make it resemble turf you are constantly reminded that it is real and as such, you need to deal with weeds. Weeds come in a variety of forms but the result is always the same. They look bad, they take up space and try to kill off the thing you want, grass.

While you may never completely declare victory over weeds, there are four things you can do to always keep the upper hand on the annoying curse named weed. These steps will help prevent weeds, maintain and manage the ones you have and finally kill of what you can.

The first step in your weed battles needs to be prevention. Prevention requires you to attack the weeds while they are only seeds. To do this you need to purchase a pre-emergent. Generally this can be added spread out across your lawn like you would as if you were reseeding your lawn. The pre-emergent will act to stop weed seeds by killing them without hurting your grass seeds.

If some seeds get by your pre-emergent, the second step to manage the growth is to mow often. When you mow you allow your grass, the good stuff, to expand and assume the nutrients around them. You also allow the grass to grow higher then the weeds which results in the weed seeds being deprived sun and failing to grow.

Now not all weeds are going to grow in a convenient place. They will find every crack and pile of dirt to plant roots and grow. This means that they may be outside of your normal mowing area. In this case, the third step is old fashion weed pulling. It is a manual process. It is laborious, but it is a must for some locations in your yard. The good news is that there are many tools out there available to help you pick the weeds with their roots without needing to bend your back or get on your knees. Use of these tools will help make the job seem more reasonable.

The final approach and the least popular one is the use of chemicals or herbicides to spray the unwanted enemy, weeds. These come in a variety of forms the best ones are specific to the kind of weeds you are trying to kill in your yard and should not have any impact to your lawn. These herbicides are chemicals and can be harmful to people and pets in a variety of ways so should be used as a last option.

Weeds will always come back year after year even if you are religious about your application of these four practices. However if you stick to your guns and follow the four steps your garden will look great each year and in the end, that is all that matters.