I was looking into using a neighbors clippings to add to leaves in the fall for compost and was wondering if it would be ok. The information may be helpful. Some herbicides breakdown quickly, other's don't. One thing I read said you shouldn't use grass clippings treated with herbicide in compost or garden mulch all season long. This one indicates you have to wait at least 3 mowings another indicates that dicamba (Banvel is very slow to break down and that if grass clippings that were treated with dicamba are used in a compost pile, that compost should only be used on the lawn. Not trying to scare you, but it's important to know what was used before deciding how long to wait. In most states, you have to be licensed and take regular tests to apply these treatments so whoever applied it should be very familiar with it. I recommend you give them a call, ask what was used, how much was applied, tell them you are planning to hand pull the veronica and ask them how long you should wait. I thought most places required applicators to give you an instruction sheet after an application that would also indicated what was used. At least tell you when to take the little flags out :) I guess not every place is the same.

It would be helpful to have some more information. You're assuming you have to have weeds and use weed killers. You don't have to have weeds, so if you could answer some questions we could figure out why have have weeds to begin with. Where do you live? What kind of grass do you have? What weeds do you have (grassy or broadleaf)? How are you watering (how often and for how long)? How high/low are you mowing? When were the last 2 times you fertilized and what did you use? I absolutely agree with organics. If you're concerned about the water then you might be concerned about using Milorganite. Milorganite is semi-processed sewage from Milwaukee. I use alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow) because it is rather inexpensive for me. You might use soybean meal if that is less expensive. The application rate is 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. You can use it as often as you want.

I concur with Kimpa. My neighbor 2 doors down tried to get rid of her sedges last year by using SedgeHammer. She says the SedgeHammer didn't work. (I don't know if my neighbor used it correctly or not and didn't probe to find out, but she is a retired teacher, so I would have to say she probably did follow instructions to a tee.) 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?

Okay, I'll say it before all the rest: The only completely chemical-free way to get weeds out of the lawn is to pull them up by hand. Preferably within a day after a wallopin' heavy rainstorm. Or after the lawn has been sufficiently irrigated so as to have the soil wet at least 3" down - if you're going after dandelions, it's best to have soil wet about 5" down. It really is not that big a deal - although how big depends on how many weeds to the square foot of lawn. Start at the farthest point and work your way backwards, so you aren't walking over the area just weeded. If you have reasonably good soil, your weight is not going to compact it much, even though it's wet, and getting up the deep roots is a wonderful aerator. If you can get most of the weeds in the early spring, there won't be too many the rest of the year. Speaking from experience, the first time, the first year (after we bought a previously owned and very neglected house) it took me about 10 hours each day for over 3 days to clear mostly dandelions and wild violets from the front lawn, 100'x125'. They were really healthy d'lions with taproots that went down more than 18". There were literally more d'lions than grass. I threw grass seed over the area after I finished (not the proper way to do it, but by that time, I didn't really care!) which did pretty good at filling in the bare spots. I had to pull weeds for a couple hours every few days April and May because the baby weeds kept coming up, but by June there was a pretty good lawn. The second year I pulled for maybe an hour a week for those months, and since then I pull for an hour or two in early April and again in mid-May. That gets most of the weeds. The violets are far more difficult to eradicate since even a tiny piece of root will make a new plant - I'm still pulling them out of the lawn every spring but at least now I have to look for them hiding in the grass. So it IS possible (just very time-consuming) to get rid of weeds without resorting to poisons. In the years since I have tried several home-remedy-type applications of which boiling water or full-strength (5%) vinegar are more-than-less effective for spot-treatments. I'm experimenting with the use of fine corn-meal as a pre-emergent weed treatment, but I haven't been able to decide just how much it helps - mostly because I'm not sure just when is the most effective time to spread it.