Safety comes first when using lawn chemicals
Proper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is a good investment, especially when working with volatile products on and around your lawn. Most people have a natural aversion to ...
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Spraying weeds can be a highly complicated matter as there are different herbicides to treat different weeds. The herbicides can slightly work or be very different, they can be tolerant or intolerant of different lawn types, and the complications can continue.
However, for most of us, if we know the weed types we’re dealing with we can usually purchase the appropriate herbicide for our needs and apply it with reasonable certainty when following the instructions on the packaging.
Our aim with this article is to give an overview of some of the considerations that people should be aware of when doing any type of weed spraying on their lawns.
Many of the most commonly-used herbicides can be toxic to some of the most popular lawn varieties. In most cases, these herbicides are used to kill broadleaf weeds in lawns.
The lawn types most adversely affected by these weed killers are Buffalo and sometimes Kikuyu. But other herbicides can also affect other grass types. We couldn’t possibly list every brand of herbicide available – so always check the label before purchase to see whether they are safe to use on your lawn type.
The increasing popularity of Soft Leaf Buffalo varieties like Sapphire®, Prestige® and Palmetto®, and their susceptibility to many weed killers has led to the development of special herbicides for Buffalo grass. Look for these first if you own a Buffalo lawn.
There are many weed types which are found in home lawns – most of the common weed types can be controlled by the homeowner with the use of herbicides bought from the local lawn care or online gardening shop, such as Lawnpride.
But there are some weeds which the homeowner cannot treat themselves, as the poison is considered too toxic to be handled and disposed of safely by the general public. These restricted weed killers are available to licensed weed sprayers, so if you do find yourself faced with weeds you cannot control – the best and easiest option is to make a quick call to a licensed professional weed spraying contractor.
Mowing lawns create open wounds in the grass leaf, while these wounds remain open the lawn will absorb any weed killers which are applied to it.
The lawn can become very sick or even die in areas if herbicides are applied to newly mowed lawns, so the general rule is to wait for one week after mowing before applying weed killers to the lawn – and to wait one week after applying weed killers before mowing the lawn again.
For more information, check out our plethora of helpful articles on Lawn Mowing and Weed Control.
Needless to say, if a lawn were watered or if it rained after applying herbicides, the herbicide would be washed away with the water. Always be sure that no water will go onto the lawn within a few days of spraying – a few days more would be even better. For more info, make sure to head over to our Lawn Watering Advice articles.
Herbicides such as Winter Grass Killer is not absorbed by the leaf of the weeds like most other herbicides. This herbicide will need to be watered into the soil after application in order for it to be absorbed by the roots of the Winter Grass.
No need to say it but, herbicides are highly poisonous.
Be sure to store herbicides in a safe place out of reach of children. Always be sure to keep children and pets off the lawn for several days after application. Even better would be to wait until after the first lawn watering before allowing pets and children back onto the lawn.
