How to control weeds in your lawn

Post-holiday season lawn care

Summer holidays can be brutal on lawns. Lots of happy active feet and paws, backyard parties and temperature extremes can all leave the lawn looking a bit patchy and weary.

Weeds are opportunistic and will invade a lawn when it’s down! Weeds often creep into lawns during summer if the lawn has been under heat or drought stress, or even if it's had too much rainfall.

Broadleaf weeds like dandelions, capeweed, plantain and thistles will start to pop up, particularly in bare spots - they're an open invitation to weeds. Yates Weed'n'Feed is a quick and easy hose-on solution for broadleaf weeds. Yates Weed’n’Feed has added surfactant to aid spray coverage and weed penetration and contains nutrients to give the lawn a quick green up. Just what the lawn needs at the end of a long hot summer!

Make sure you get the weeds under control before they have a chance to flower and set seed, as this will create multiple future generations of weeds. In the case of Onehunga Weed, you need to kill it before it flowers to stop the prickles from forming. If you have prickles in your lawn this February, an application of our Yates Prickle Weedkiller in early spring will prevent them for next summer.

There are a few tricky and invasive weeds that you'll need to call in the big guns for - native hydrocotyle (Hydrocotyle moschata is pictured below) and creeping oxalis are examples. To get on top of persistent weeds, choose Yates Hydrocotyle Killer for the job.