Gerry's Blog - Turf King

Hi Lou

Regarding vegetation treatments for your industrial site.

Under the Cosmetic Pesticide Ban, there are limited options for non-selective herbicides to treat areas where no vegetation is wanted.

Even prior to the ban, most products that would prevent any regrowth for 4-6 months had been discontinued. Those types of products while effective, did their work by staying in the soil for an extended period of time. The downside of those products was that they effectively contaminated the soil for a period of time.

Now after the Ban, products like Roundup can only be used in situations where there are poisonous plants like poison ivy or where there is legislation mandating the removal of vegetation. This would be on sites where there are flammable products stored or near electric transformers.

Most industrial sites do not qualify for the use of Roundup. Even Roundup, will only control any existing plants and does not prevent any seedlings from germinating 2 days after treatment. The only advantage of Roundup is that is does control the weeds right down to the roots.

The products that can be use currently are basically products that kill off the top growth. For young seedlings, killing the top of the plant, the green parts is often enough to kill the plant. On more mature weeds, killing the top part often still allows the plant to regrow from the roots. Compared to merely mowing down the top of the plants, these herbicides will allow some additional time before regrowth happens, but for more complete control, the herbicide would need to be applied anywhere from 3 to 6 times per year.

Depending on your industrial site, it may be possible to reduce weed growth by investing in other methods of control. These are not always permanent solutions and they may not be worth the investment. Of course, depending on the circumstances and the situation, not all are appropriate.

Some possibilities include:

Paving the area- weeds will then only grow where the asphalt meets the building or curb.

Removing the soil and installing landscape fabric and stone mulch or gravel. This will be sufficient for some time, but weeds seeds will eventually grow in gravel or mulch also.

Sodding- Sometimes a lawn is less maintenance- because it get mowed regularly.

Dense ground cover or shrubbery that does not grow too high but is vigorous enough to keep weeds out.

KingHamilton

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Out visiting lawn care customers and inspecting lawns today

Found some tiny grubs. At this size - they have only recently hatched from eggs. The adults are presumably European chafer. White grub larvae could also come from the eggs of Japanese beetle. Usually, though, Japanese beetles don't lay their eggs until later in August and are not likely to have hatched yet.

You can see that compared to the size of a penny, the grub larva is still very small.

Baby Grubs can still damage lawns

For Lawn Care Treatments including Nematodes for White Grubs Call the Lawn Care Experts Turf King

There are NO easy solutions for Quack Grass under the McGuinty rules of the Cosmetic Pesticide ban

There is no selective treatment to kill quack grass I.e. nothing to kill it without killing or damaging the lawn grasses .

Any of the herbicides that are allowed now will not control quackgrass completely

Best thing is Roundup, but it legal only for controlling things like poison ivy. Roundup would be absorbed by the quackgrass blades and is taken down to the roots and will kill the entire plant.

If you wish to follow the rules, digging up would work if you dig at least 10-12 inches deep and sift through any clods of soil to make sure that there are not any roots in that particular clump of soil as a small piece if root can re-grow. Merely "pulling" is likely to be futile as you will likely leave a lot of roots behind .

If you're not in a hurry you could rototill the soil, then wait for the roots to dry out. But you would have to do this multiple times as the roots that are buried will remain viable. Plus - the downside is- the rototilling will also chop the roots into many many small pieces that can regrow.

The slow way to control quackgrass is to mow the lawn more often and to fertilize the lawn fairly regularly and fairly heavy. Regular lawn grass responds better to fertilizer than quack grass. This will help to outgrow the quack. By mowing more often, you will remove the faster growing quackgrass and slowly allow the other grasses to better compete against the quack grass. This process is likely to take several years.

Anyways - these are your options. Unless the quackgrass is removed completely it will come back. Even when we used roundup legally, there is always the risk the the soil contains some seeds which can sprout at some later time. But careful inspection of the lawn should be performed regularly to remove quackgrass when it is a small clump- before it spreads into a major nuisance