I’m a gardening expert – how to kill dandelions & make sure they don’t come back for the whole season
DANDELIONS are notoriously hard to eradicate, and even when you think you've eliminated them, they rear their fluffy heads again.
By using strategies from garden experts, you can keep them away all season. Understand exactly what you're dealing with, to start.
Home experts at 21oak explained that killing off dandelions for good of the issue.
"The main problem is that once a dandelion plant fully establishes its 10-inch taproot, the weed will come back year after year," the experts explained.
The perennial plants will return next year, no matter how hard you work to spray them into submission unless you can dig deep and remove the roots.
And the sooner you do that, the better. As any gardener knows, spotting one dandelion early in the season means seeing more and more crop up all summer.
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A single dandelion can be responsible for dozens more next year.
"It also spreads its seeds around your lawn continually, thus creating more and more weeds," the experts said.
Herbicides will only go so far in killing off dandelions for good, so you'll need to try a different tactic, like digging them up. It's easiest with wet soil.
"If you can’t dig up the plants right after it rained, use a watering can to moisten the soil around the dandelion and wait a few minutes for the water to soak in," the pros at 21oak wrote.
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Next, grab a weeding knife, and insert it into the dirt near the base of the weed. Try a few different places to loosen things up.
"Push the soil away from the plant by wiggling the knife," the experts instructed. "Once the plant is loose enough, use your hands to pull from the base of the plant gently."
If you encounter resistance, use the weeding knife to dig deeper until you can pull the whole root out with the plant.
You should have a hole left behind – and that is what you can target with herbicide.
"The only way to ensure all of the roots are gone is to treat the hole that the weed came out of," the experts advised.
You'll need to use precision here. If you accidentally overdo it, you risk killing all the grass and other plants near the spot you uprooted your dandelion from.
Once you've destroyed the dandelion patches in your lawn, re-fill the holes with dirt, and consider adding a pre-emergent herbicide to the soil to stop other weeds from cropping up later.
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You might see some patchy spots, but your grass should spread to cover them next season.
If you fertilize your grass and cut it on a regular schedule, you should be able to strengthen its root systems, which will make your lawn more even and lush. That helps keep dandelions at bay, too.