Many of us with severe weed infestations in our lawns will naturally look to buying and applying a broadleaf weed killing herbicide to our lawns as a means to control and eradicate these weeds from our turf. While others of us may pick up a hose attachable bottle of some type of Weed and Feed when we’re at the local garden nursery, to perhaps give our lawns a bit of a pick-me-up while also hoping to kill off the odd weed or three while we’re at it.
All good, and we’re not going to go into specifics of weed killing herbicides here.
Instead, let’s focus on killing weeds with a herbicide, and lawn mowing !!
While the two topics don’t seem to be specifically related, each action does have a result on the other in important ways that we need to be aware of before undertaking either lawn mowing or lawn weed spraying too close together to each other.
Lawn Mowing Too Soon After Weed Spraying
Let’s imagine that we just sprayed our lawn for weeds this morning. Remembering that these herbicides are selective plant killers that have been formulated in a way so that weeds will die but the lawn will not die, even though the herbicide can be just as toxic to a lawn as well.
Now what would happen if we then mowed our lawn that same afternoon, or even the next day?
Firstly we would be removing a lot of the weed spray from off the weeds, because we would be mowing the weeds as well as the lawn. So now each weed now contains less herbicide, so the effectiveness of the herbicide on each weed is now lessened, So we’ve just reduced the effectiveness of the herbicide and we’ve just ensured that our weeds will most likely survive this weed spraying.
Also, should we mow too soon after spraying for weeds, then we should remember that the lawn too is coated with weed spray, and we’ve just opened up new wounds on the leaf of the turf whereby the surrounding poison can now leach into those fresh wounds. So by mowing our lawns too soon after spraying them for weeds, we could make our lawns very very sick, though it would be unlikely that we could kill the lawn this way, but it would most likely need to to recover.
Weed Spraying Too Soon After Lawn Mowing
Alternatively, what if we just finished mowing our lawns this morning, and then we went and sprayed the lawn with a herbicide that same afternoon or the next day?
Yes, once again we would be spraying a plant herbicide directly into the open wounds of all the leaf matter of the lawn that were created when we mowed the lawn. And once again we’ve just made our lawn very very sick, and the only thing we could expect next would be a very brown lawn for quite some time, with the possibility that some areas of the lawn may possibly also die off.
The Solution
The best time to spray for lawn weeds, either with a dedicated broadleaf weed spray or a “weed and feed” product, is one week after lawn mowing, and one week before the next lawn mowing.
This way the lawn always has time to heal its wounds from mowing before herbicide is applied, and it also allows time for the herbicide to work on killing the weeds before we come along and remove parts of the weed which also contains the herbicide with our lawn mower.
One week after mowing and one week before lawn mowing is the golden rule when weed spraying lawns, though even longer time either side of mowing is even better.
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