if you're struggling with weed grasses in your lawn in this video
i used three different methods and show you the results of each how i'm trying to control
wheat grasses in my lawn without any chemicals after spending hours and hours of picking out
wheatgrasses from the lawn it's safe to say i've officially lost the battle but in this
video i'm going to go through three different methods that you can use from berta cutting to
raking and using some other tools to see if we can fight back so first up let's talk about what
is power power is a grass like any other grass and it looks something like this you can often see it
by its lighter color and it brings up these little white seed heads which flower every couple of days
most people think that you can just cut it back and it'll go away but i've seen bistuff seeded
on a golf course down to three millimeters so just cutting it down simply to a lower level
is not going to work or be an effective strategy in the long run it's something that is very very
difficult to control especially if you're in the uk where you don't have access to some of
the chemicals needed to suppress it or kill it off and whilst it can look good in the right
setting when it's in the wrong setting such as a ryegrass or fescue grass type of lawn and you've
got clumps of this type of grass in there it gives an uneven appearance and the white seed heads can
really spoil the visual appearance of the lawn so first up i'm going to try vertical in
just to see what that does to the lawn mine's in really bad state so it should be a good example
of what you can achieve by vertical tin if you don't have a vertical air don't worry i'm going
to be covering some other methods that you can use as well that have a similar result
so the first stop method is 30 cutting this is a vertical cartridge and it fits inside a cylinder
machine now cylinder machines not everybody has one so i will come to some other methods later
on in the video but this is the first method that i'm going to use there's a couple of
different options you can get here and there's a couple of different brands available and i'm
not paid by this brand although this particular tool has been given to me to use in the video
now what this cartridge will do is you can see here rather than mowing in a rotary type
of fashion or cutting with the reel these sort of blades here will get into the sward and hopefully
rip or lift those grasses out of the lawn now we're going to give it a try to see if it works
i'm going to put the collector box on and we'll see how much that gets pulled out of this lawn
so i've got the vertical set in the machine but what my thoughts are is that i normally
mow this way going forwards and backwards so i'm going to vertical in the left to right direction
so
a
okay so that was running the vertical cartridge and look what it brought up
what i can see in here is loads of dead grass brown grass and seed heads like this
so in terms of dragging up those seed heads it definitely worked but it hasn't got them all um
oh
so you can see with the cut clippings are much lighter
fine and it's a nice little trim versus these much more strawy and dead grass clippings
but what i can also see in here is loads and loads of little seed heads so it's definitely
poured those seed heads up and we've taken them out the lawn now that isn't going to
stop the plant from producing more seed heads but it's a battle one for today
okay so what about if you don't have a vertical cartridge for your machine now there are some
other methods that you can use i'm going to show you a second method and stay tuned for the last
method and you can pick which is your favorite method by leaving me a comment in the comment
section below okay so the second method is going to be using a homeowner type of cassette system
a lot of these systems will have two blades that come with them one will be the springtime almost
like a rake scarifier and they'll be displayed here which they'll call the d thatcher or an
aerator now what we want to do here is we can use this blade but we want to set it on a high setting
we're not scarifying the lawn we're not ripping out loads of matter from the lawn especially in
the heat we're just running a fine high setting through the lawn and just lifting out any of
those wheatgrasses you can see this is the stuff we're looking to remove we're not looking to strip
back the lawn so let's put this cartridge in the machine and give it a pass to see what comes out
um
the pass with the aerator machine on the high setting has also done a really nice job and i'm
setting each of these tools on quite a high setting because i want to give each tool an
opportunity to kind of show what it's done to the lawn um so let's go and take a look so you can
see clearly these grasses are standing up on end and you can see the machine's just making these
light little tracks through the grass where it's just lifting things up nothing too heavy
but clearing out the sword so let's take a look what we've got inside the iron hill scarifier unit
and again loads and loads of seed heads
so i'm not going to pull that one out because you kind of get the gist of where this is going
and i'll have to clean it up later but you can see that this is doing quite a good job of stripping
out those seed heads now this will not stop the plant from flowering it will flower again because
it wants to produce seed to survive for the next season however what my hope is is if i can remove
as many of these seed heads as i can through this vertical in process regular mowing hopefully that
it will reduce the vigor of the plants ready for next season and i can try to stay on top
of it and prevent it spreading as much as i can so with that being said let me go on to
the last method which is the simplest and easiest method but it does involve a little bit of work
okay so the last method is using a manual rake like this you can use a springtime rake as well
this is a dedicated scarifying rake and again i am not scarifying their lawn i'm just using it to
break through and lift some of these grasses up so all that's left to do now is um run the mower
over the cross the top and pick up any of those remaining seed heads and try to keep on top of
this process so you can see in this area we've really cleaned it up from where it first started
for sure there's still some grass there but it's a lot better leave me a comment in the comment
section below which your favorite method is and if you've got any tips that i've missed in this video
for how you control weed grasses at home thanks for watching if you've enjoyed the video like and
subscribe to my channel it's matt the garden and lawn care guy and i'll see you in the next video