Fairfield Hardware Doit Best

Now is the time to apply your second application of your 4-step fertilizer plan. You need to get this down between now and the end of the month. If you have already applied your second step remember minimum 6 weeks between applications.

If you are on our standard Greenview 4-step plan you are now ready to apply Greenview 2-Way. 2-Way is a weed & feed application that is applied to the yard with the dew of the morning still on the grass. Then we need to have two days of sunshine. If you have already applied your 2-Way you still can touch-up your yard’s weeds with a liquid application. Most liquid weed killers are temperature sensitive. The high of the day needs to stay below 85 degrees or the herbicides will start to kill your grass too!

If you are on our yard thickening low growth custom 4-step plan, you are ready for your first “purple bag” of the year.

Remember the purple bag develops root growth so that your yard will be naturally green. On this plan you have to treat your yard for weeds with a liquid weed killer. We have basically 3 choices of liquid weed killers. Ortho Weed-B-Gone is by far the most popular, but the poorest performer. This product pretty much kills only dandelions. It takes several applications to kill the toughest weeds. The best choice of chemicals to kill the weeds in your yard is a chemical called Trimec. We carry this in many different products from several manufactures. This is the best chemical for dandelion, chickweed, clover, and many more. This does the killing in one spraying if applied correctly. The third type of weed killer is an All-In-One weed killer & crabgrass killer. You use this only if you skipped the first step of crabgrass prevention or some crabgrass crept into your yard. I like to apply my liquid weed killer with an end of hose sprayer. My favorite model is a Dial-a-Mix sprayer, which cost $16.49. This allows the easiest mixing because there is no premixing and all leftover chemicals can be poured back into the bottle. You can get by with a standard lawn sprayer for $6.79 which requires premixing before use and you can not have any leftover chemicals when you are done, so a little preplanning needs to be done.

Now is also the time to spray your fence row and any where you don’t want to use a trimmer. My favorite is a product that was called Triox. It’s new name is called Ground Clear and is a concentrate, not the ready to use item with the same name. Look for the one that still has the reference to Triox on the label. This is a complete vegetation killer for the entire year. I use this everywhere because I HATE TO TRIM! I apply this with my tank sprayer to be able to control the width of spray. You get 75 square feet of coverage from a quart of concentrate. So I adjust the width of the spray to between 3 to 4 inches wide, so I can stretch the quart bottle to 225 feet of fence line. This product is far superior to Roundup, which is what I first started using, but I found out that weeds can start to grow within 2 weeks of applying and I was stuck trimming and spraying again. Once I found Triox about 15 years ago it is hard to use anything else.

As a reminder do not sow grass seed after using any weed killer till after 6 weeks has passed. Also if you want to use a weed killer on your new grass or new yard, you need to wait till you cut your new grass 3 times before applying any weed killer.

We hope you have had a wonderful spring and we look forward to serving you this summer