At first, it looks like crabgrass - a florescent yellow weed poking its head above the darker green turf. But upon further examination, it doesn't look like crabgrass; it's thin and wiry and grows straight up. The crabgrass plants grow flat to the ground.

So, you grab a hold of one or two or three plants and pull them out of the ground. There, you say to yourself triumphantly, that will take care of that. Except that later on not only are the plants you picked back, there are even more of them!

Undaunted, you pick them again. Only this time, you examine one. It looks like a grass, sort of, but not really. It has a triangular stem and is stiff and glossy. Maybe you let it grow tall enough so that it went to flower. But that flower does not look like grass flowers, it looks like a piece of Velcro.

What the heck is this stuff? And how do I get rid of it!

It's Yellow Nutsedge. And I can hear you say, "is there no end to the list of weeds that I have to endure in my lawn"?

Yellow Nutsedge is neither a grass, nor a broadleaf weed, like a dandelion. It is, as its name would suggest, a sedge. A sedge resembles a grass but they are of two different families altogether, which makes controlling nutsedge all the more difficult.

Nutsedge is a weed primarily of moist, rich soils. However, once an infestation begins, it will spread to soils that are drier and poorer. Typically, but not exclusively, we see it in lawns that were established as sod or lawns that were established using topsoil harvested from old farms. This is due to the fact that it was formerly a weed of agricultural crops before it was widely regarded as a weed of lawns.

Unlike the grasses, which reproduce by seed sexually and by tillers, stolons and rhizomes vegetatively, the nutsedge reproduces almost exclusively by little tubers, or nutlets, that are attached to the roots of the plant. Nutsedge will create many of these nutlets along its roots during a season, thus when you pull out a plant you are simply instructing the plant to reproduce itself by means of all the nutlets that were attached to the parent plant. Picking one plant only yields a multitude of new ones in its place.

So, how do we control this weed? The product choices for chemical controls for nutsedge are very limited, and even then the products will require repeat applications. Moreover, we can't utilize our highly productive machinery to make quick work of nutsedge, either. Because the plant both grows upright and is covered in a waxy film, it requires that the technician spray the weed from the side by hand. And it's not easy to get the spray to stick to the waxy surface of the leaf.

Lawn Dawg works to keep costs low so we do not include treatment for nutsedge in our program. We would be happy to evaluate any infestations of nutsedge that you may have in your lawn. Please call 888-925-3294 to receive an estimate and to schedule treatment to control this weed.