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Spring is here, and that means lawn chores. “Grass is a weed,” my wife and I tell each other. But with 3/5 of an acre, much of it lawn, we have a lot of grass to care for.
Aside from mowing, one of my first tasks every year is weed control. I’m not anal-retentive about this — though I used to be — but I do like to eliminate most of the worst offenders. Dandelions are my nemesis.
Many of my friends use Roundup to control weeds in their lawns. I use a weedpopper. People think I’m crazy, but I love the thing. Here’s why:
- It’s cheap. Mine cost me something like $5 a decade ago. It’s still in excellent condition. How much does Roundup cost?
- It’s quick. It takes no more time to remove a dandelion with my weedpopper than it does to spray it with an herbicide.
- There’s no setup. When you spray weeds, you’ve got to get your equipment out and fill the tank. When you’ve finished, you need to rinse everything. With my weedpopper, I pick it up and go.
- It’s safe. Here’s the material safety data sheet for Roundup (PDF).
I love the “decrease in survival” for the rats. Translation: it kills them.(See Angie’s comment below.) I wouldn’t let a four-year-old play with a weedpopper, but it’s quite safe for adult use. - It’s effective. It takes a couple days for weeds sprayed with Roundup to shrivel and die (along with the grass around them). The weedpopper targets the weed precisely and removes it immediately.
- It provides exercise. Yes, to use a weedpopper, you need to be able to crouch and stand, crouch and stand. It’s not a lot of exercise, but it’s more than I’d get carrying a sprayer.
- The sense of satisfaction. When I pop a dandelion from the ground, it makes a pleasing ripping noise. I then toss the weed into the bucket with its mates. It’s a dandelion graveyard.
A weedpopper isn’t for everyone, but I do think it’s an excellent choice for those with small lawns. (And, obviously, I use it on my very large lawn.) I have a friend who is anal-retentive about his lawn — it’s a thing of beauty. He uses a sprayer. I gave him a weedpopper for his birthday last year thinking it might be handy for spot weeding, but he won’t use it.
“It puts divots in my lawn,” he says. I’ve been using a weedpopper for fifteen years (this is my second one), and have never been bothered by unusual divots. But if these might bother you, then a weedpopper isn’t a good choice. For everyone else, it’s a cheap and useful tool.
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April 14th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I thankfully don’t have a lawn yet, but when I get one, hopefully it will be out in the country where I won’t have to deal with zoning laws and such, and therefore won’t have to worry about the weeds. I like the idea of a natural lawn. Rather than spending a whole lot of time, money, and effort sculpting the lawn into a perfectly flat, evenly green square of grass, I’d rather have the variety and color that comes with letting nature take care of it. If I want to look at a perfectly groomed lawn, I’ll go play golf
April 14th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
And for extra-frugality, you can eat the dandy greens (and everything else, apparently): http://landscaping.about.com/od/weedsdiseases/a/kill_dandelions_2.htm
April 14th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
I’m with you on the weedpopper, and murdering dandelions is my idea of A Very Good Time. For those of us with cranky backs, there are weedpoppers with long handles - no crouching. Love my weedpopper!
April 14th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
I’ve never heard of these. I’m going to go look for one.
Currently I just yank on weeds with my bare or gloved hands. Unless I let them get too big; then I cut them down with a saw.
Currently dandelions are some of the best plants in my yard. I keep the ones that look like yours, though I do pull the ones with much smaller flowers and gnarlier leaves.
Gaming the credit system - sometimes you can’t just let your lawn grow wild if you want a variety of plants because some plants will take over your entire yard. You may have heard of kudzu which could take over the entire planet, covering trees, buildings, and cars.
I don’t have kudzu, but I do have some very sticky thing, beggar’s lice, fruitless mulberry, johnson grass, and nut grass. I have sometimes pulled 80 plants of a single variety from a single square foot of land. Not to scare you, but it’s scary to the point where I don’t quite understand how anyone could enjoy gardening.
Go to a garden shop and ask what the invasive plants in your area are. Some of them are quite beautiful, but then again, sometimes you want more than one plant.
April 14th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
When we bought our first house, I was obsessed with keeping our lawn completely weed free. Every week, I would get down on my hands and knees to pull out the minutest weeds. I would cover every square foot of the lawn. It took me an hour or two each time. It was futile. The weeds always returned.
Eventually I came to realize that my time was worth more than that. I refused to give into the broadleaf weeds (like dandelions), but that’s just because they’re big and unsightly and oh-so-easy to remove.
When we moved to this house, the size of the lawn just about made me faint. There was no way I was going to do much weeding here. (And I’ll be damned if I’m going to fertilize! I don’t want the lawn to grow. No way. Let it be stunted.) I’ve found that just a few minutes a week with the weedpopper keeps things weed-free. There’s one patch, though, next to the road that cannot be helped. It’s a dandelion forest…
April 14th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
My family was even cheaper. Dad would round up the kids Saturday afternoon, issue a steak knife to each of us, and send us marching into the yards to kill dandelions. Weedpopper? Not in my day!
April 14th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I love dandelions. You can’t get any more cheerful than a bright yellow dandelion.
My horse’s vet recommends leaving dandelions on the lawn so that my horse can eat them. He LOVES them. The vet assures me they are very good for him. I would never go dig them up. My horse would be very annoyed.
April 14th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
My yard is all gravel, but I still get weeds! Can you believe that? I don’t think a weedpopper would be efficient since I would have to dig up an area around the weed to get to the dirt. Nope, I’m a Roundup guy.
April 14th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
JD, my friend, I have the utmost respect for your financial writing, but you clearly need some help interpreting MSDSs.
This chemical is NOT highly toxic to rats, nor any of the animals tested as listed on the MSDS. Of course animal studies are used in order to get a sense of how humans might respond to a chemical exposure. Whatever the shortcomings of that assumption, it’s at least a ballpark figure to consider.
Let’s look at the numbers in this document. The only mention of “decrease of survival” is in the studies of pregnant rats and rabbits. The value listed for “NOAEL toxicity” or “NOAEL development, where NOAEL stands for “No Observed Adverse Effect Level”, is 1000mg glyphosate per kilogram of body weight for rats, and 175 mg glyphosate per kilogram of body weight for rabbits.
If we extraplate the rat limit to a person who weighs 220 lbs (=100 kg), that person would have to eat 100 grams of straight glyphosate in order to have any “adverse effects”. That’s about three ounces, about the mass to two standard-sized Hershey chocolate bars.
If we extrapolate the (lower) rabbit limit to a 220 lb person, they’d have to eat 17.5 grams of straight glyphosate in order to have any “adverse effects”. That’s maybe a size of a bite out of the aforementioned Hershey bar.
And it’s assuming that the bar is not made out of cheap chocolate, but pure solid herbicide.
Not gonna happen.
The above data are about the specific herbicide component. The Roundup formulation described in that MSDS is a mixture of 41% glyphosate by mass and 59% “other”, undoubtedly water, salts, surfactants. There are toxicity data for this Roundup formulation, too.
For rat oral exposure, the LD50 is >5000 mg/kg. “LD50″ is a measure of toxicology, too, where they give a bunch of rats X level of the material under study, and another bunch of rats Y level, and another bunch Z level, and so on. They find the level of material, again expressed in milligrams of substance per kilogram of animal body weight, that kills half of the animals in a particular exposure “bunch”. LD50 stands for “Lethal Dose 50%”, or the amount of stuff that kills 50% of the test animals in a group.
So, for rats, the oral LD50 is >5000 mg of Roundup formulation per kg of body weight. Extrapolating to a 220 lb (100 kg) person, that means you’d have to eat more than 500 grams of Roundup formulation to have a 50% chance of death. 500 grams is about 18 ounces–over 1 lb.
The LD50 for rat dermal (skin) exposure is also >5000 mg/kg. So, if you were 220 lbs, you could wallow naked in 1 lb of concentrated Roundup and still have a damn fine chance to live to tell about it.
LD50 is a pretty common toxicological benchmark, and >5000 mg/kg is very low toxicity. Here are some LD50 values for comparison (courtesy of Dr. Google):
Caffeine, oral rat, 192 mg/kg (same for oral human!)
sucrose (table sugar), oral rat, 29,700 mg/kg
aspartame(nutrasweet), oral rat, >10,000 mg/kg
sucralose(Splenda) >10,000 mg/kg
So: whatever sweetener you take in your coffee is less toxic than that formulation of Roundup, but the caffeine is way, way, WAY more toxic.
With all due respect, JD, you know not of which you speak. There are all kinds of great reasons for going organic, but fear of Roundup killing you ain’t one of them.
Pardon the rant, but I’m a chemistry teacher, and there’s enough ignorant alarmist crap out there about chemistry already in the world. It’s my professional duty to set the story straight!
April 14th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
April 14th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Didn’t I tell you guys over at the forum that I’m quantitative? Like I was sayin’.
I commend your excellent taste in women, and your wife’s taste in vocation. Please ask her to gently beat you about the head and neck with a graduated cylinder on my behalf.
April 14th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Looks good. Where do I buy one of these on the cheap?
April 15th, 2007 at 12:25 am
I also strangely enjoy pulling weeds. It is quite therapeutic, both for the lawn and for me!
April 15th, 2007 at 5:11 am
The lawn was about four acres, I was with my parents and at the time, I had a part time job. Mowed four days and worked three.
My view of lawn maintenance was simple. If the green stuff, bluegrass, crabgrass, dandelion and UGP (Unidentifiable Green Plant)was under a certain size, it got mowed.
Over a certain size, and with bark , not. I never watered,weeded, or fed the lawn, that would just encourage it and it would have to be cut even more. Always looked forward to a drought season. Somehow, it stayed mostly green and choked out most of the weeds on it’s own. I certainly wasn’t into the golf course standard of lawn care.
The mower was at the highest setting, so it would grow less. Astroturf doesn’t grow, and green concrete would actually be useful, but those suggestions were always ignored.
April 15th, 2007 at 5:50 am
If you are really cheap, or just misplaced your weedpopper, you can use a medium-large flat screwdriver. Works almost as well, but might leave a bit of a divot.
April 15th, 2007 at 5:54 am
Dandelions are not the enemy… actually, they can be used in the kitchen, which makes them an excellent friend for frugal living. Even better: Since you get them fresh off the land, they’re even healthier than most things you can buy at the grocery store…
Let me show you 2 things to do with dandelions:
1) Use the leaves as a replacement for lettuce. Make sure to only use the young leaves, the old ones get bitter. My favorite: Collectthe leaves, wash them, add a little bit of balsamico and walnut oil. Done.
2) Something very few people know, but the flowers (the full, yellow one) can be used to MAKE HONEY. Well, at least something that’s very close to honey - and again we know excatcly what’s in it (compared to the stuff bought at the grocery store).
How to do it: collect about 400 (!!) flowers and rinse them off. Put them in about 3/4 gallon water and add 2 lemons. Let this boil for about 15 minutes, then pass it thru a sieve (non metal if possible). Some people let the resulting juice rest for 24 hours before continuing; I never do, but it’s supposed to be even nicer.
Anyway, take the flower/lemon juice and add about 4lbs sugar (I use the cheapest brown sugar I can find at the wholesale place). Bring to a boil and let simmer for about 4-5 hours (stir from time to time!!!). Put the result in a bunch of airtight (glass) containers - Done! This keeps for ages and is very, very nice…. and much cheaper than any honey you can buy!
Have phun with this - or look out for more recipes with dandelions - there’s tons of them out there.
Incidentally, there’s a lot more things to do with common “weeds” like nettles, bear allium, etc… All of these “forgotten” foods were commonplace in the kitchen in my great-grandma’s time and are available for free if you know when they’re in season,where to find them, and what to do with them.
April 15th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Just work at night and sleep during the day, that way you can’t see them.
April 15th, 2007 at 8:36 am
If you’re eating lots of dandelion leaves, just be aware that they can be a fairly powerful diuretic, hence the French name for dandelions: pissenlit (literally “pee in the bed.”)
April 15th, 2007 at 11:55 am
My dad had a weedpopper. He was out in the yard all.the.time the first few years, popping weeds (and he loved it!) After those first few years, there was a dramatic reduction of weeds in the yard - there just wasn’t many seeds to grow into weeds, since the parent plants were gone before they could seed the yard!
April 15th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I have to say that the weed popper is not for me at this time, but I will certainly keep it in mind. I live in North Central Florida with a sand lot for a yard. I am attempting to start a centipede grass lawn, but it has been slow going. I can only use sulpher once every 60 days to try to lower the pH from its old 7.0 a year ago to a range of 5.0-6.0 So, until I get more grass, if I took out the weeds, I’d have nothing to hold down the soil!!!! LOL!
But, I will certainly keep it in mind if I ever get a lawn to work with!
P.S. Many common weeds do not like an acid soil. For example, crabgrass prefers a pH of 6.0 to 7.0. If your grass will grow with an acid soil, reducing the soil’s pH will reduce the ability for weeds to grow in the first place.
April 15th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Does the popper work on wild green onions? I’ve got a million. Everytime we mow it smells of serious onion.
April 15th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Dickey45, that’s kind of a cool problem. (Have you ever read the young adult novel Holes? I think it was also made into a movie, with ?Sigourney Weaver? Wild onions figure heavily in the plot. You might enjoy it!)
The popper is especially good for getting rid of dandelions because those plants have a long, deep tap root. Grabbing the leaves and pulling will generally only net you a handful of leaves, or maybe just a tiny bit of root.
I’m guessing that wild green onion is like any other member of the onion family, with a bulb at the base and some pretty “whiskery” roots keeping it anchored. I’ll further guess that hand-pulling should do the trick to get them out, but if that hasn’t worked for you, getting a popper underneath ‘em could certainly help.
Good luck!
My family was out in the backyard enjoying the nice weather today, and there must have been 200 dandelions out there. Not one of the high priorities on the fixer-upper list this year. And as an avid gardener, here’s something I never thought I’d say about dandelions: there *is* something good about them. Little kids love them and adore picking them!
I am protective of the flowers I work to grow and don’t really want my kids to pick those. It is kind of nice to have dandelions in the yard so that I am just as happy as my kids are, when they have picked a handful to give to me.
April 15th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
My parents gave me one of these last year but I’ve been to busy to use it, the weeds are winning
April 16th, 2007 at 2:56 am
What is wrong with dandelions? They are really nice and you can even make a delicious salad from the green leaves, when they are still young.
If you want a quick solution for weeds, try a daisy cutter: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/blu-82.htm
SCNR,
Chris
April 16th, 2007 at 6:05 am
I used to dig them, but they grow in clumps and I couldn’t seem to get them all.
I’ve discovered that the onions can be killed with any of the standard broad leaf weed killers. Before spraying, drag your foot across the plant in order to break the surface of the plant a little bit so the chemical can get in. If you don’t crush it, the onions are fairly resistant, and your spraying will be largely ineffective. You don’t have to do this with other weeds.
April 16th, 2007 at 10:03 am
I just spent yesterday weeding. I was going to pay a gardener to do it, but then my Dad asked me: “Weeding gives you exercise, gets you outside, and is satisfying. Why would you pay someone to do that for you?” Thanks, Dad. Today, my shoulders are pleasantly sore, my yard looks beautiful, and I’ve still got money in my pocket.
April 16th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Just to play devil’s advocate a bit - I also have a weed popper, but I spray too. In fact, I *have* to spray. I have this tree that dumps literally thousands of seeds on my yard. I mean literally thousands of seeds. I started counting once. I said to myself I’ll pull up a hundred weeds and then I’ll take a break. I barely cleared a couple sqaure feet of garden. The tree is like 80 feet tall so removing it wouldn’t be easy.
April 16th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Oh!! And one other thing I forgot to mention - I don’t recommend the cheap weed popper. I bought the cheapest one and the head on it broke off. So next time I bought a more expensive one and it’s holding up so far.
April 16th, 2007 at 11:07 am
I dont care about weeds, but my wife does. If we get any dandelions in the front it is embarassing.
I grew up with over an acre and lived down a dirt road. Every lot had at least an acre so we had no neighbors or “street” to impress.
I also had to cut the grass with a push mower when I was a kid and I didnt like it too much. I hate all things grass, weeds, plants,etc. My dad made us stay outside all day and do work. So now I like to sit on the computer.
Here there are companies who will “treat” the whole yard for only 50 bucks. We usually just do it ourselves. Some Scott stuff, I think. Whatever it is, its cheap and works.
April 16th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
If you really want to save money, after you weedpop the dandelions, you can save a few leaves and put them in your salad (they’re really bitter if it gets into summer time though)
Yum!
Or make dandelion wine.
How’s this
April 19th, 2007 at 4:03 am
Dandelions are a plant brought originally from Europe as an edible. They taste great.
The American obsession with laws is ridiculous, however. My opinion is to turn the front lawn into a food garden. If you’re going to weed, at least you’ll get something out of it. zoning reg’s be damned.
June 6th, 2007 at 8:58 am
You’re not make divots. You’re “aerating.”
July 18th, 2007 at 8:42 am
My feeling is that if you can grow grass, you don’t have enough trees. I have a lot fewer weeds in the lush, shady, fern and moss and azalea areas of the yard than I do in the sunny corner…
Plant some deciduous trees, and save on the weeding, mowing, and your electric bill!
July 18th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Or you could cut the leaves off the dandelions and feed them to your iguana. Leaving the root in the ground means you get harvest after harvest.
I am SO jealous of people who have lawns full of dandelions. They’d save a ton of money on iguana veggies. Have you ever looked at the prices on dandelion greens at the grocery store?!
(I suppose you could feed the greens to people, instead. They’re a particularly healthy green, full of vitamins and protein, and they’re great in salads.)
I’d love free onions, too.
Apocryphal fun fact: the idea of having a lawn made of pure grass was an invention of the weed killer companies. Broadleaf weed killers kill dandelions, which is the idea, but they also killed all the clover in your lawn. Previously clover was a feature, not a bug, and you were supposed to enjoy your lawn full of grass and clover.
September 4th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
In addition to my own yard, I maintain 15,000 sq ft of lawn at our Kingdom Hall. That’s a lawn that I need / want to keep looking like a park all season long. It’s too far away to take care of the weeds manually, so I use a weed & feed in the spring and fall.
Weed control is helped by keeping the grass strong. Part of this is to water properly. Part of it is to fertilize properly (NOT heavily … properly) and part of it is to mow at the correct height for the species and time of year. For me, this means short in the spring and fall, and gradually longer as the weather heats up until it is at roughly 2 1/2″ - 3″ in mid-late June. This helps the grass to out-compete. Basically, I only get weeds where the lawn gets stressed. We had a trailer overhanging the lawn for a season. The grass died and the weeds took over. Now that the trailer is gone, I will re-seed this fall. I also get a good crop of weeds alongside a service dive that gets a lot of traffic. In the winter it gets salted. That’s out of my control. In the summer it suffers from the heat. That, also, is out of my control. But it still looks better than most of the lawns in the neighborhood because of the cultural things I do that ARE in my control.
I am in the northern third of the US and am growing cool-season varieties … my advice applies only to those in similar circumstances.
Folks elsewhere can look up the proper care of their turf grasses just by doing an internet search for the term “turf grass”.