It's dandelion season and our favorite springtime nemesis is busily popping up all over the place.

  

Humans and dandelions go back a long way together, but none of that is important when your lawn is a sea of yellow when your goal was a carpet of green.

  

When tending to a lawn, it is always wise to understand your adversaries, be they grubs or chinch bugs or in this case dandelions. By understanding a little bit about them and how we together approach the problem we can work together to control this problem.

  

The dandelion gets it name from the French, literally meaning "Lion's tooth" after the appearance of its leaves. It's a member of the aster family; one of its cousins is the sunflower - not really surprising if you think about it. The dandelion's botanical name, Taraxacum, is derived from the translations of medieval Arabic medical texts - dandelions are apparently quite the diuretic.

  

Additionally, dandelions are completely edible - you've no doubt heard of dandelion salad and dandelion wine. They taste rather bitter, but then again so do a lot of greens that we use in salads.

  

Dandelions are perennial weeds that germinate from seeds that can be blown in from great distances. Once established, they complete for light, water, nutrients and space with the turfgrass that we are trying to cultivate.

  

One thing that agronomists know is that conditions that are favorable for dandelions are pretty much exactly the same as those that are favorable for turfgrass. Thus, if you can remove the dandelions and feed the turf, there's a pretty good chance that the lawn will thrive.

  

How do we control them? First, let's stipulate that digging up dandelions will not work. The dandelion can reproduce itself from wherever it is broken off by you. A feature of the plant called the taproot contains sufficient stored nutrients to grow right back quickly.

  

Nor can we treat for dandelions preemergently as we do for crabgrass. The dandelion, paradoxically, has to be there for us to control it. If we apply a weed control on Monday and the dandelion seed germinates on Tuesday, you're going to have a dandelion.

  

The most effective strategy for dealing with dandelions is to use my two favorite herbicides: patience and persistence. It is better to be patient and allow as many dandelions to germinate as possible in the spring and then to apply the control than to spray a single dandelion, or to try and dig it out. It is better to be persistent with the expectation that there are many, many dandelion seeds available for germination in your lawn already that will need to be drawn down. Being persistent with control efforts will always lead to a diminishment in the number of weeds present in a lawn over time.

  

Sometimes it is suggested that weed controls must be applied before the dandelion goes to seed. Obviously, if the plant goes to seed, there will be more seeds available to germinate later, but consider that the dandelion seeds can be broadcast over a very large area because of the seed's ability to be carried on the wind. Also, consider the innumerable dandelions that abut your property. The numbers overwhelm you. It is best to concentrate upon the plants that are present and not the seeds that are cast about.

Fortunately, dandelions are a quick kill for us. When we apply the weed control, you'll notice within a day that the flower stalk will elongate and curl downward. The vegetative part of the plant will similarly elongate and curl. Death follows quickly, and within a couple of weeks the plant has decomposed to the point where it is no longer noticeable, and the surrounding turf will begin to fill in where the dandelion once was.