I second the spot treatment with "weed d gone". This stuff is very
reasonably safe. The extreme tree huggers here will tell you that you
can have a green weed free yard using only "natural" herbicides and
mechanical removal but it just ain't so. No where in nature will you
find what you want to achieve - i.e. a mono crop of a single (or at
least a few) desirable grass varieties. This just does not occur in
nature and you will not get this result with so called "natural"
control, unless you are prepared to expend an extreme amount of effort
and walk your yard every day or two looking for and pulling undesirable
species. You can get this result with a reasonable amount of physical
labor and judicious use of man made herbicides. Spot treatment with an
over the counter herbicide like "weed b gone" applied as per the label
with a little common sense (i.e. washing up after applying it and
waiting the proscribed time before letting anyone on the lawn) will harm
neither you nor the environment.

An even more benign herbicide is a glyphosate like Roundup (or it's
clones). Glyphosate is not some mysterious complicated chemical. It is
about as toxic as table salt (which indeed will kill you if you drink
enough salt water). It in fact kills plants in the same manner as
pouring salt on them would. The glyphosate is absorbed by the green
leafy part of the plant and is then transported to the root system.
There it reverses the osmotic flow that normally carries water and
nutrients into the root systems. The presence of ions that the
glyphosate disassociates into causes this osmotic flow to run backwards
which kills the plant mainly through the loss of water. Pouring salt on
the plant would do exactly the same thing except the salt would persist
in the soil and kill anything else that tried to grow there later
whereas the glyphosate has no ground activity. Of course, this
herbicide is a lot less selective and will kill any green actively
growing plant that gets a sufficient dose. If you are very careful and
get a fine spray right down on the weed and are careful not to get it on
your grass you can spot treat dandelions without taking out your grass
(or at least an acceptably small bit of it). I do this sometimes when
I've got just a few handfull of weeds sprouting and I don't need to
treat a whole area. It does take a little care and practice (and a
windless day) so you wouldn't want to try to treat a couple of dozen
weeds this way. This is what you do once you've gotten the bulk of your
problems under control with a broadleaf herbicide like "weed b gone".
BTW, if you live in a warm climate and have a lawn of a warm season
grass like Bermuda, you can spray weeds fairly indiscriminatly while and
only while the lawn is dormate, say in mid to late February. I used to
live further south and had a Bermuda lawn and this was one of the
benefits. Roundup only works on green, active plant. As long as the
lawn is soundly dormant the Roundup won't touch it. Of course you had
to be careful and not wait too late when things were starting to wake up.



wrote:
As you've found out, trying to get rid of them by digging them out
isn't very effective, not to mention a pain to do. They can have
roots a couple of feet deep and unless you get most of it, they come
back. I'd go with spot treatment with a broadleaf weed killer, like
weed b gone. Use a small tank sprayer which will allow you to deliver
it right to the target, meaning you will use very little herbicide.
Once you get rid of them, in a thick healthy lawn, you should only have
a small amount in the future, which you can deal with the same way.