Three Common Weeds And How To Treat Them

Bruce Granger:

Hello, I’m Bruce Granger with NaturalLawn of America, and today we wanted to talk about weeds. We get calls all the time from customers that they have weeds. The problem with the discussion of weeds is there really is no such thing as a weed. There’s individual types of plants, but a weed is just a broad category definition of something growing out of place. So then you have to get down to what type of plant is it and how can we control it.

So one of the plants we were going to look at today is called doveweed. This particular plant has always been in the Houston area, but it has become more of an issue since Harvey, and it is a difficult plant to control, but we can control it. So each time we come out to the lawn, we’re going to check. If we find these types of plants, we will spray them with a herbicide and try and knock them down. But you can see these are the seeds, and they are a prolific seeder. So this is just going to cause problems for next year because those seeds are going to want to grow. So that’s one of the plants we deal with in the Houston area.

Another one is Virginia buttonweed. This plant, typically you don’t realize you have in your lawn until it starts to flower, and as soon as it flowers, the phone rings and it’s like, “I got weeds.” Well, it’s probably been there for a while, but now it’s noticeable because it’s flowering. But this is a plant that we also can control, and when we come out, if we find it, we’re going to spray it and knock it down. But you can see again, with all these plants, they seed, and the seed is the enemy. So you can see all these seeds that are going to just be here for next year to try and come up.

Then along the lines of weeds, you have grasses, and this is also a weed that you don’t want in the lawn, but this is grass. And the problem with grass is from a chemical standpoint, the only thing that’s going to kill this plant is going to kill my Bermuda lawn. So this we control, but it’s a completely different process in trying to stop the plant from coming up in the fall or in the spring to eliminate it.