Taking Care of Winter Weeds

Did we really need another reason to hate winter? Just looking at your beautiful turf may just give you one more..

Yes, it’s that time of year when winter weeds start to emerge – the enemy of all lawn lovers (and their furry friends).

Never fear though, the best time to treat winter weeds in your lawn is during winter (that means right now!). By doing so, you have a better chance of getting them before germination. This will stop them from dropping their seeds back into the soil and coming back again next season.

Here are a few winter weeds to keep an eye out for, and how to treat them.

Winter Grass (Poa Annua) is a low growing turf grass with soft, drooping green leaves grown in tufts and triangular shaped seed heads. If you allow Winter Grass to drop its seeds, next winter it will be back, twice as nasty as the previous year.

How to remove Winter Grass from your lawn:

Winter Grass can be removed very easily by hand as it doesn’t have deep roots or runners, and grows in simple clumps. You can also use a combination of a pre-emergent and a selective Winter Grass control at the correct time of year (now!) 

Broadleaf Weeds and Clover

Broad leaf winter weeds are the most prevalent in lawns at this time of year. Mainly because of their size – they just stand out more. Even though a healthy lawn with dense coverage will help minimise the impact of winter weed invasion, and hence reduce the amount of work to eradicate pesky weeds coming into spring, it is not uncommon that a broad leaf weed with larger foliage will be more obvious when your lawn is less active outside the traditional growing season of warm season grass varieties.

How to remove Broadleaf Weeds and Clover from your lawn:

Use a spray-on herbicide to kill bindii, catsear, clover, creeping oxalis, cudweed, dandelion, plain thistle and other broad leaf weeds.

Creeping Oxalis

Creeping Oxalis has small light green heart shaped leaves, very similar in appearance to clover, except that it has oval shaped leaves. The flowers are about 3-4mm in diameter and bright yellow in colour containing five petals. Creeping Oxalis quickly runs along the surface of the soil and produces roots from the leaf as it goes. When seed pods mature they dry out and explode, causing the seed to spread.

How to remove creeping Oxalis from your lawn:

Once again, a selective herbicide will help to eradicate these weeds in all lawn types including kikuyu and couch and are safe to use on most varieties of buffalo.