You can easily mistake a grass weed species for another. After all, you have to pay every attention before making sure of its identity. Still, how exactly can you differentiate between dallisgrass and crabgrass?
You’ve most likely seen both of these grass weeds, but you aren’t fully aware of their distinct characteristics. This is why we’ve made a quick guide to help you easily identify one from the other – including how they should be managed in your garden.
Identifying Dallisgrass Weed
via John D. Byrd
It’s not hard to determine if a weed is dallisgrass. First of all, it has a coarse texture. As for its appearance, the dallisgrass features a circular clump that grows as much as possible. These outer rings can smother both the center of the dallisgrass and the surrounding grasses in your garden.
Furthermore, dallisgrass weed grows and spreads fast whether the soil in your garden is sandy or clayey. If you apply nitrogen fertilizer, its growth rate accelerates – going twice as fast as the average grasses.
Lastly, dallisgrass is hard to control due to its short rhizomes. When the soil is moist enough, it can quickly achieve root establishment.
Dallisgrass Weed Management
In order to stop dallisgrass weed from entering and wreaking havoc in your garden, you should practice proper garden maintenance. It can be hard to control dallisgrass weed once it appears in your lawn, so preventative measures such as regular mowing and adequate fertilization should be conducted.
Dallisgrass seeds are spread by animals, the wind, and by lawn mower blades. When this happens, you can control the spread by doing the pre-emergent method. This involves the application of a pre-emergent herbicide.
This herbicide should then be absorbed into the soil so that any dallisgrass seeds ending up in your garden wouldn’t grow well and die out. Whichever herbicide effectively deals with crabgrass should also work wonders against dallisgrass weed.
If the weed does spread in the garden, you can dig them out of your property or apply post-emergent herbicides. To reduce the possibility of the dallisgrass growing again, you must use this herbicide a couple of times every two or three weeks.
Here’s a video talking about dallisgrass control:
Identifying Crabgrass Weed
Crabgrass is also considered an unwanted weed that can readily spread in lawns and even on the side of the road. It’s an annual grassy weed, and there are two common species in the northeastern region of the United State: smooth crabgrass weed and large crabgrass weed.
As the name implies, the large crabgrass weed has a bigger size than the second crabgrass species. Likewise, large crabgrass has significantly more hair on its leaves compared to the smooth crabgrass.
Regardless of the species, crabgrass weed usually goes through germination during the late spring season. This grass then grows at the beginning of summer before rapidly developing once the summer heat arises.
The fact that crabgrass grows during warm weather makes it difficult to handle in the garden. Once the hot temperature arrives, the cool season grasses become dormant while this grass weed reaches its final growth phase.
Crabgrass Weed Management
You can prevent the onslaught of crabgrass weed with a pre-emergent herbicide. Once the spring season arrives, use this herbicide to create a protective barrier in your garden against the arrival of crabgrass seeds. Combined with regular lawn maintenance, your property shouldn’t be heavily affected by incoming crabgrass seeds.
Once crabgrass does grow on your property, it’s time to use post-emergent herbicide. Here, you can choose either a selective herbicide or a non-selective variant. Simply put, the initial variant will only deal with crabgrass weed while the later will kill the beneficial grasses.
Why should anyone pick the non-selective post-emergent herbicide? Some lawns could be so terribly dominated by crabgrass weed that it’s much better to get rid of everything and start a new lawn. When every other preventative and removal method fails, this is your final option.
As you can see, there are certain differences between dallisgrass and crabgrass even if they are both considered as weeds. If you have any queries, feel free to give us a comment.
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