How to Get Rid of Crabgrass without Damaging the Lawn - Weed Control Tips

hey guys it's jason creel and you're watching the lawn care life in this video i'm going to show you crab grass at a very early life stage and i'll help you identify then i'm going to show you some products that you can control crabgrass with in your lawn without actually killing your grass so let's take a look and get started right now [Music] all right crabgrass is one of those weeds that i think gets badly misunderstood i get told that such and such weeds crabgrass like for instance if i go a lot of times and look at a yard and somebody come out and say this is crabgrass or this is crabgrass or maybe this is crabgrass you know the truth is none of those are crabgrass people think any grassy weed some people not everybody but they think it's all crabgrass well and the other thing that happens to me doing weed control and fertilization is often times i'll spray a yard early in the year after the crabgrass is germinated let's say april or so and i'll talk to the customer and say hey listen the crabgrass already germinated there's a possibility that you're going to have crabgrass in your yard this summer because we we missed the opportunity for the pre-emergent um and and they not their head you know and it comes back about june and there's crabgrass in the yard and they say oh my yard looks worse than when it started you know and that's just one of those things maybe i need to improve on how i can explain it but if you're looking at crabgrass and i am in mid-april in alabama okay so depending on where you live and the climate there it may be at a different life stage all right so this is centipede grass the darker color but you see all that little tiny light green plant that's coming up and it's coming up all over the place that is baby crab grass and it's all in here all those little seedlings right there baby crabgrass okay and it's everywhere i mean it's all all in here and this is a real thin area of the lawn and it's just you know you've had crabgrass from the year four there's more baby crab grass again not to be confused with that dallas grass or some of these other cool season grasses in this area um but that that's what it is and you so you would notice that if you weren't looking for or didn't know what you're looking for then you would say you know you wouldn't really notice it in the lawn but if you know what you're looking for you can get down there and you can find it so at this stage what do you do because like i said we're mid april so the crab grass is already here so let's just go over the the crabgrass schedule and best case scenario what would what we should have done okay i'm to show you some products and this is a product called resolute now you can get the active ingredient here is prodiamine and you can get this prodiamine in a granular product or this is a dish you mix with water you can get a liquid version whatever um and you apply it before the crabgrass germinates so for me being in kind of the birmingham alabama market i want to put this out in january or february you know it's maybe early february if you're further south you want to get down even before that so if you're a crab guy if you get you know freezing weather in the winter and kills the crabgrass and then you want to put this out before it germinates the following year okay so if you put this out now in april with visible baby crabgrass all in the yard is it going to do anything for the crabgrass absolutely not okay don't waste your money now will it help with some other weeds that haven't germinated yet sure it will do that so again best case scenario you put this out early before the crab grass germinates okay that's great do that better be earlier and late sometimes people think they got to put out like the day before it germinates you know it's like just put it out and put it out in january if you want to i mean it's better to be early than late now let's say it's this time of year um april and you see the crabgrass i mean we've shown in this video it's already germinated it's there looking at you you got a couple options well one you can just ignore it and just you know deal with it for this year but if it's still early enough where you probably have a chance to kill it so you can use a product called dimension and it again it comes in granular or you know different forms you can spray it or you can spread it and it will prevent crab you know works as a pre-emergent and a post-emergency so when we say prevent it it actually just kills it during the you know right after you germinate so that you don't actually see it in a lawn but it will actually have some effect on the crabgrass at this early life stage now once it gets much past this i wouldn't recommend using dimension all right another option is to use just a straight post-emergent product like this this is cue ball another one is called drive xlr8 drive accelerate but if they spell out x l are the number eight um and these both or another one is solitaire and they they have the active ingredient let's see it here quinclorac okay and this is a a straight post-emergent for crabgrass okay it works on some other weeds as well but this is kind of like quincy is the crabgrass post-emergent now don't use this on a on the centipede or saint augustine lawn before bermuda zoysia lawns we can spray with that so this is another option now again this i'm showing you is in the cmp launch so this wouldn't be an option there but in a bermuda lawn if i get a new customer that signs up let's say mid-march through the end of may then i'm gonna probably go in there and spray it with something like this and this whole bottle covers one acre and then also i'll probably put the the resolute prodiamine in there with it to try to help uh you know any other weeds that hadn't germinated or maybe some of the crabgrass that germinated and this is you know not nearly as expensive as this product so this is cheaper and more effective but if you're too late then you go to something like this or you go to dimension now once you get in the summer and the crab grass is big and ugly in the summer i mean it's very difficult to kill you can you can try if you want to you can use solitaire you can do multiple applications you may have some success it's easier to kill when it's early in the life cycle or late in the life cycle but by the time it's late in the life cycle you know my thought is just don't worry about it and let the cold weather kill it unless you're in a place where we never get freezing weather at that point you know the cold weather's not going to kill it now just a straight up homeowner grade product from the big box store you got this you see here it says kills yellow nuts sage kills 470 weeds plus crabgrass killer so what's the crabgrass killer let's see if we can get it to zoom in enough um but anyway i'm sitting there looking at it it's 2-4-d is in there and you got that camera you got sulfetrazone which is your nutsedge product and then or at least for this and then uh for yelling that says and you got quinclorac in here now it's a lesser amount so again they're the quincorak is what they're trying to use for the crabgrass killer now with it work i mean again it's easier to kill early and like in the middle of summer it's just very challenging to kill mature crabgrass so be honest i wouldn't even attempt it okay i hope it makes sense put your pre-emergent out early before the crabgrass germinates put a post-emergent in there like a three-way herbicide or something like that to kill the broadleaf weeds that are already in the lawn you do that you're pretty much covered for crabgrass but if you're too late for that and you still get it early in the life cycle in the spring then fine go in there with a dimension or with uh something that has quinclorac in it and try to get it from a post-emergency standpoint once you get into summer very difficult can control it once you get late in the fall if you're going to get freezing weather then it's just don't worry about it okay it's just going to die when it gets cold and prevent it the following year with your dimension hope this helps you learn what crabgrass looks like even it's very early stages and a lot of times if you had a yard that had a lot of crabgrass the year before you can see where all the dead crabgrass was from the year before and that's where you want to get down there and start looking in a lot and see if you can see that baby crab grass starts springing up and often times it'll start growing more visible and quicker near sidewalks or driveway because the heat radiating off of that cement is warming up the soil quicker and thus causing those seeds to germinate earlier than something that was you know out in the middle of the yard wasn't getting quite as warm of soil temperatures all right enough about crabgrass hope this video has been helpful if so give it a thumbs up leave a comment and i would encourage you to subscribe the channel and check out the other 600 plus lawn care videos on the channel if you're in the lawn business and you want to get started with lawn biz or weed control and fertilization or mosquito spraying i've got lots of resources over at lawncarelife.com courses available and other products to help you in that venture talk to you later thanks a lot bye you

Channel: Lawn Care Life

Views: 24,433

Keywords: how to control crabgrass, how to get rid of crabgrass, how to kill crabgrass, crabgrass, weed control, lawn care tips, lawn care life, jason creel, how to kill crabgrass in the lawn without hurting the lawn, how to kill weeds without damaging the lawn

Id: STsNLxZKxD0

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021