Rid Your Yard of Weeds

LESLIE: Now we’re going to take a call from Eric in Indiana who has weeds in his garden.

Eric, how can we help?

ERIC: OK, I have a lot in my front yard. I live on a lake and it seems like we’re having a lot of weeds. I’ve got chickweed, grass weed, dandelions, and I’ve used Scotts and a couple other things and they don’t seem to be going away. And I was wondering if there’s any suggestions that you think I might be able to use so I can get rid of these weeds.

TOM: Hmm. Well, I’ll tell you, my entire yard was made of weeds once (Leslie chuckles) and I’ll tell you how I dealt with it once and for all. I figured I could spend year after year after year trying to tackle those one weed at a time but I decided to do something called a Roundup restoration, which is basically where you kill the whole yard with Roundup. I zapped the entire, stinking yard. My neighbors were trying to figure out what happened to my house because all the grass turned brown all at once. And this is something you do in the fall, by the way.

And then, after all those weeds die down, you put new seed right on top of where those weeds are. And the weeds sort of act as like a mulch; they hold the seed very moist. It sprouts and starts to grow pretty nicely in the fall, then it goes dormant for the winter, and then in the spring it really comes up strong. And by the second year – the first year, the blades were thin. By the second year, it was so thick and tough and because I maintained it from that point forward, hardly a weed will dare rear its ugly head in that lawn now.

ERIC: Oh, OK. Yeah, so basically just like Roundup would kill everything then, right?

TOM: That’s what I did. It worked great.

ERIC: OK.

TOM: OK?

ERIC: Alright, thanks very much.

TOM: Alright. You’re welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT, 888-666-3974.

It’s Tom’s secret to chemical weed-whacking, Leslie. (chuckles)

LESLIE: Just annihilate everything.

TOM: Just nuke it, baby.  (both chuckle) Nuke the whole thing and start again.

Alright, let’s get back to the phones.