New member here looking for a bit of advice on these weeds. I know the quick answer is to pull them, which i have done, repeatedly. Unfortunately, they continue to come back and are spreading.

I am a complete novice when it comes to lawn care (just purchased my first home about 2 years ago) and I don't know where to begin in dealing with this problem. Can anyone identify this weed or point me in the direction of the best weed killer/preventer to use on it?

Thank you all very much for your help!

Hand pulling is the best method, but seldom is done correctly. Dandelions have a very long brittle tap root that can reach 10 inches in depth. If one little piece is left in the ground it will regenerate and come back.

Second problem is the seeds from one single plant can travel for miles on the wind.

The only real effective post-mergent herbicide is Glyphosphate aka Round Up. Problem is RU is a non selective herbicide and will kill any grass or plant it comes into contact with.

A semi effective post-mergence herbicide is any containing 2-4D.

Best control is pre-emergence herbicides, but that will do nothing for existing plants.

I did a bit more research and I had landed on bull thistle or spear thistle. My picture isn't a particularly good one above, but these leaves and the stems are pretty spikey and annoying! I will start pulling and think about some weed killer, but I don't want to harm the surrounding shrubs in the bed.

Thanks again for your help!

The other day while she was in my backyard, she was surprised to see that the many sedges I had in my backyard last year were all gone. Shocked, she asked how did you get rid of the sedges? I told her I pulled them every single time I saw them, trying to get as much of the rhizomes as possible. After a little practice, you can get the hang of it and can sometimes finesse a small portion of the rhizome out along with the upper plant. You won't get all of the rhizome though.

But the key is just pulling the plant out repeatedly. Eventually the carbohydrate reserves inside the plants' tubers buried in the ground will be used up, so the plant won't have enough energy to send up new shoots. At that point, it will die. It may take 3 or 4 pullings for the sedges to die. You could also dig into the ground to remove the tubers along with the shoots to kill the whole plant in one fell swoop, but I never did that because I didn't want to disturb the surrounding grass which was good, healthy zoysia.

I learned about this procedure from David Mellor's great book called The Lawn Bible. I think he (or someone else maybe) wrote that the first time you pull a plant, the plant can exhaust 60 percent of its energy reserves to recreate its upper shoot. Do that enough times, and it just exhausts all its energy. The plant makes energy through its leaves through photosynthesis from the sun, so you don't want to allow the leaves to regrow for too long, otherwise the plant replenishes some of its energy reserves.

I also tried this multiple pull procedure on dandelions. It was harder to eliminate my sideyard's dozen dandelions that way than it was the sedges. The sedges were much easier to eliminate this way than the dandelions. But eventually the dandelions were no more too. You could try eliminating the dandelions quickly by removing their tap root. At least with dandelions you know where the tap root is (directly below the plant), unlike the sedges' tubers.

By the way, removing the shoot (which is defined as everything above ground for the plant) and then burning the very top of the dandelion's tap root with a blow torch didn't work for me. The tap root recovered after a week or so and produced a new shoot. And I tell ya, I burned the tops of those tap roots to a crisp, and they still recovered. Of course, I haven't tried The Dragon torch--just a regular blow torch--so I can't speak to The Dragon's effectiveness, but I have my doubts. Anyone tried The Dragon on dandelions' tap roots?

smithmal