Just imagine that the plants we try to grow can easily be damaged or killed, while the weeds that we don’t even attempt to grow are harder to kill or remove from your lawn.
With that situation in mind, we can still provide you with the best advice that’ll help you master how to get rid of weeds in Florida lawn.
We’ll first make sure you can identify 10 of the most common Florida lawn weeds, then we’ll discuss How to Get Rid of Weeds in Florida Lawn by applying the best practices and preventive measures.
Read through this Lawn Advisors guide for more helpful information.
Hard to Kill Florida Weeds
Here are some of the toughest to kill Florida Weeds:
1. Florida Betony (Rattlesnake Weed)
2. Dollarweed
3. Torpedograss
4. Purple Nutsedge
5. Chamberbitter
6. Crabgrass
7. Florida Beggarweed
8. Nutsedge
9. Water Hyacinth
10. Field Bindweed
1. Florida Betony (also known as Rattlesnake Weed) can easily form tubers that help start a new plant in no time, making it as invasive and hard to kill as it can possibly be.
2. Dollarweed is a perennial weed that travels away from the parent and establishes large-sized offspring colonies away from the parent weed.
3. Torpedograss has rhizomes that seek parting away from the parent weed and forming new plants elsewhere, making countering their growth a hard task to carry out.
4. Purple Nutsedge is one of the world’s worst invasive weeds based on a study in 2009.
5. Chamberbitter is also a hard to kill weed that forms capsules filled with seeds and once the environment is ideal, it starts colonizing on an annual basis whenever the parent weed finds a hospitable area to start its colony.
6. Crabgrass is also an invasive plant that threatens native plants and natural habitats around it.
7. Florida Beggarweed can easily reach 9 feet in height if you leave it unattended. Then it produces purple and blue-ish flowers that can take over more areas in no time.
8. Nutsedge (Yellow) naturally reproduces through its root system making your efforts to eradicate its existence in your lawn harder and harder, while it can still grow to various heights in the process.
9. Water Hyacinth reproduces too fast by seeds and floating plantlets, as it can double its population in less than a week, while controlling its growth should be done by controlling the whole climate it thrives on, which is harder than any other weed control process.
10. Field Bindweed likes to snake its way up in growth, and then gets itself tangled in other plants and kills them in the process.
How to Get rid of Weeds in Florida Lawn
To get rid of weeds in Florida lawn, you need to first identify the weed, its nature, its life cycle, its pros and cons, why it invaded your lawn, then start a series of interventions, including mowing the lawn, removing lawn by hand, blocking it out from receiving its proper feeding, or using herbicides. Then you should carry out another series of preventive measures, to make sure such a weed invasion in your Florida lawn won’t occur again.
Here’s how to get rid of weeds in Florida lawn:
1. Regular Mowing Schedule
Consistently mowing your lawn during the weed growing season will disrupt the growth of most weed types that may grow in your lawn, cutting their seeding & flowering timings, and depriving them from having a hospitable environment for potential growth that would lead to damaging my lawn.
2. Hand Pulling Weeds
Regularly spotting your lawn for weeds will help you intervene in a closer time than noticing a whole new colony that has been growing for some time already.
Once you spot the newly growing weed, you should dig up their roots and hand pull the whole weed at once. Then patch the bare spot with a plug of new grass to instantly repair the damaged area.
However, hand pulling weeds is only practical against a few weeds, as it can’t be as effective against a colony of thousands of weeds in a small lawn.
3. Block Out the Sun
As for areas that have been infected with weeds, it may be better to apply a sun-blocking membrane, or add several inches of mulch to the infected area.
This will deprive the weeds of their need for the sun, and would die in a matter of days.
Once you’ve killed the whole area containing weeds, you can start all over from scratch and seed your lawn once more.
4. Using Herbicides
As explained earlier, you should be able to first identify the weed, its nature, its life cycle, its pros and cons, and why it invaded your lawn, before selecting the proper type of herbicides that you’ll use to get rid of weeds in your Florida lawn.
Different weed types require different approaches, and consulting a weed control expert will help you decide which herbicides you’ll use to counter the weed growth in your lawn.
Preventive Measures To Get Rid of Weeds in Florida Lawn
1. Maintain a Healthy & Thick Lawn
The best defense against any type of invading weeds in Florida lawn is to create a strong root system that’s built by the grasses in your lawn. The healthy and thick lawn will prevent the growth of any invading weeds, and deprive them from the chance of feeding off of the lawn’s grasses.
To create this strong environment, limit foot traffic over the lawn, ensure you carry out a regular irrigation schedule, and trim the lawn to 2.5 inches deep so the lawn becomes as healthy as it can be against such unwanted invasions.
2. Apply Pre-emergent Fertilizer
Pre-emergent fertilizers usually include targeted herbicides that stop common invading weeds from finding a welcoming home in your lawn.
Choose the pre-emergent fertilizer that suits the types of potential weed invasions your area has been suffering from in recent years.
It’s also a good idea to apply a second round of pre-emergent fertilizer to your lawn after 2 months of applying the first round, to catch late sprouting varieties.
3. Post-emergent Herbicide
Additionally, you can use post-emergent herbicides to work on young weeds who have found their way past your consistent maintenance and preventive measures.
Post-emergent herbicides work best when there’s plenty of rainfall, and they work perfectly with other simple methods of weed removal like hand-pulling after applying the post-emergent herbicide of your choice.
Summary
This concludes our guide on how to get rid of weeds in Florida Lawn, as we showcased 10 of the most common Florida lawn weeds that you may encounter, and they’re pretty hard to remove.
Additionally, we provided you with another list of intervention methods that’ll help you master how to get rid of weeds in Florida Lawn.
Then, and finally, you have preventive measures that’ll help you prevent such weed invasions from happening in the first place.
This video talks about how to treat weeds in north Florida, make sure to check it out:
