What about you ! Welcome to Premier Lawns Videos. Today we're going to talk about king of the weeds,
dandelions. We're going to tell you the benefits behind having these
in your garden, what it indicates, and more importantly how to get rid of it. Let's go .......
If you have a lot of dandelions in your lawn it indicates a couple of main things, generally that
the calcium levels in your lawn are probably lower than what they should be, and dandelions
from the way it grows it actually adds calcium to your soil. It does that by, dandelions have a
very big deep tap root that goes down into the soil, they do prefer lawns that are heavily compacted
and as that root gets pulled down into the soil, it breaks up the soil around it and it brings the
calcium up from way down under your lawn, and up, and it makes it available for other plants.
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Now I do a lot of beginner level lawn care.
Dandelions are a very important plant to have in your garden, especially first thing in spring,
because they're one of the early flowers if you look at your lawn in spring. That's why
you hear a lot about "No Mow May", anybody that's wondering what No Mow May is, it's
a chance not to cut your garden for a whole month, but it has a more serious note. You want to let the
plants in your garden, like the daisies, and the dandelions and the clover get them all to flower
over the month of May, and that's going to provide food for the bee population. Now there's over 200
different types of bees in the UK, it's really important to do your best to support those.
If you want to increase biodiversity in your own garden or lawn, something you could do, what we
do on this property we leave this garden here we don't use very many herbicides in here but
only spray in here every two to three years, and this lets the the wildlife, the, the weeds
grow at their own pace, and then on our main lawn we keep it very good - it's a show lawn - but in here
because we have the herbaceous beds and we have a vegetable patch with all the strawberries, the
blueberries, the blackberries as previously discussed the the dandelions are are an
important part of the biodiversity. I appreciate maybe not everybody has the space to do that,
so what I would say is, try and leave a small section of your garden, and just
let it go wild or semi-wild, or you could even try and grow the likes of dandelion in a pot !
Now I'm going to show you a really easy trick that anyone can do to identify
any plants grown in your own garden. Okay. So the hack I have for you, anybody can do this.
well I have an Android phone, I'll be using an Android app, we're going to be using a thing
called Google Lens. It's on my phone, you might have to download the Google camera app to be able
to do this. If you open the camera on your phone, the Google camera has a mode called Google Lens,
and you can tell to take a picture of different things and this is what we're going to use to
identify the plants that are in the garden .
There's a lot of weeds that grow on your lawn that would indicate that you have low, infertile soil.
Clover, crabgrass, daisy, dandelion, plantain,, ragwort, sheep sorrell, thistle, yarrow. Some weeds that grow in
fertile soil - dandelion, chickweed, chicory, clover, stinging nettle. Another benefit for having dandelions
in your garden, the entire plant is edible - apart from this big, apart from this big long stock the
rest of the plant is edible, the flowers and the leaves, and the roots. A lot of people would make
tea out of the roots. Now what I would say is if you're going to forage for, for dandelions always
go somewhere where there's no herbicides going on them, if you're going to be eating them always
wash them beforehand, because you never know if any animals gone to the toilet recently on them !!!
Okay, I get it you're watching this Video and you're saying, "Robbie,
I just want to get rid of the weeds in my lawn, how am I going to do it ? "
Be honest with you, the best way, selective herbicide spray it on, job done. Now, I get a lot of
Comments from people we did a Video similar to this a few weeks ago, about how to control
clover in your lawn, and a lot of people were saying we don't want to use, we don't want to
use a selective weed killer, and I showed you different ways to control the weeds in your lawn.
A lot of you guys were giving me different suggestions in that Video, if you have any
suggestions for me now make sure to add them in the Video Comments. A lot
of people were talking about they use some table salt, they put a spoonful or
two of table salt on top of the weeds. Some people mix it up with dishwasher soap.
I don't think personally that's good for a lawn, you're going to make the soil toxic
and nothing else is going to grow, the weeds aren't going to grow, and the grass isn't going to grow.
So the tool that you guys recommended to me in the Video is this thing here.
It's a, it's a weed puller. I've never used one before so we'll have to see how we go with that
Whenever you have the daisy trapped in it, it's dead easy, you just push that forward and out it comes.
Okay, I'm going to give you my final thoughts on this tool.
Really, I think it's a really good job. I think it's really, really easy to use, idiot proof. In fact if
I can use it, anyone can use it. Dead easy to use, works a hundred percent, as discussed it doesn't
pull out the whole root, but if you're going to be doing your weeds on a weekly basis with this tool,
well then, you're not going to have too many weeds in your lawn. Easy to use, nice and light.