Ways to Control Weeds

The measures that we can take against weeds fall into 4 categories: mechanical (cultivation), like hand-pulling or hand-weeding; cultural or cropping, when we use seeds that are strong and of good, adaptable variety, and which germinate quickly, biological which involves planting quick-growing crops with large leaf area; and chemical which involves the use of fungicides and pesticides.

Each has its merits and a good farmer uses any one of these categories or a combination of them to control the weeds that grow in his garden.

If only a few weeds are present, then it would be best to deal with them locally as in digging them out with a two-pronged fork, if they are the rosette variety, or the kind that has a long tap root, and spot treat them with a selective weed killer.

This could be applied with from an aerosol container or a puffer pack. Another method would be to inject weed killer into or on the leaves of the weed (depending on the instructions of the weed killer that you are using).

Weed Control Products

For bad infestations of the weed in your lawn, it would be necessary to treat the whole lawn. Here, a word of caution on the use of the weed killer. Once these weed killers are sprayed on to the plant, they are absorbed through the leaves into the sap, and are then circulated through the plant thereby reaching every part of it. Hence, these weed killers would be more effective if they are applied in late spring or early summer, when the plant is growing fast and the sap is at its most active.

The type of weed killer that we are talking about here is a solution of plant hormones which stimulate the plant cells so that they multiply so rapidly in certain parts of the plant, particularly the tips of the shoots, thus upsetting the plant’s metabolism to a fatal extent.

Another important point to remember is that the grass killer would be most effective if we use as fine a spray as possible, and cover as much of the leaf and shoot surface as possible. A point that could be considered would be to use soil fumigants and soil sterilants which would completely clean the soil and remove all the plants so that the soil could then be prepared for the fresh planting of the lawn. The concentration of all weed killers used has to be according to the specifications given by the manufacturing company.