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”.

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.

Plant some deciduous trees, and save on the weeding, mowing, and your electric bill!

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.

Yum!

Or make dandelion wine.

How’s this

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.

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.

If you want a quick solution for weeds, try a daisy cutter: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/blu-82.htm

SCNR,
Chris

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.