Step 3 Prevent – Keep Crabgrass Out this Summer
Ugly annual summer weeds love the heat, and boy the heat of summer is just around the corner. Crabgrass, goosegrass, and foxtail weed seeds will grow all summer long if you let them. If there is an empty space in your lawn Mother Nature will try and fill it in, and in the summer months, that’ll likely be crabgrass. When these annual grassy weeds sprout in the thin spots in your lawn, they crowd out the good grass and when the crabgrass dies off in the winter, it leaves bare spots in the lawn. Throwing down Step 3 Prevent in May is crucial to stopping this viscious weed cycle.
When Does Crabgrass Grow?
Crabgrass is an annual plant, meaning it’s killed by frost in late fall and comes back from a seed the following spring and summer. In our part of the world, crabgrass usually starts to sprout between mid-March and mid-April, but since it just needs warm soil and moisture, it can (and will) sprout all summer if you let it. So even if you missed the first round of Prevent in the spring, you’ll want to put Prevent down before the hot summer months to prevent a crabgrass invasion.
Why not make one really powerful bag of Prevent?
Why don’t we just make one really powerful bag of Prevent that lasts all season? These formulas do exists, but through our decades of experience growing grass Uncle has found that our heavy spring rains make those one-application methods inneffective, and they stop working during our hot summers when we need them most. The last thing you want to do is run out of crabgrass prevention two months early.
How does this fit into the Idiot Proof Program?
The Idiot Proof Program is a five step program designed to control and prevent weeds, feed the lawn, and allow for a fall overseeding to thicken your lawn. Steps 1 and 3 in that program are both Prevent crabgrass preventer. Prevent is a pre-emergence herbicide, which is a fancy way of saying that it can stop crabgrass before it grows. In between these two steps comes Step 2 Weed and Feed. This is a post-emergent for broadleaf weeds – meaning that it kills weeds like dandelions after they’re up and growing.
What Even Is Crabgrass?
Here we talk a lot about crabgrass, but what the heck is it!? When we say crabgrass, we definitely mean actual crabgrass, but there are actually a few grassy weeds that are common in our area. The most common ones are shown below, and before you ask, yes, Prevent can…prevent all of these weeds from sprouting. If you need help identifying a weed in the lawn, grassy or otherwise, grab a fresh sample and bring it into our Green Team and we can help identify it.
