i had a new lawn put in in late september (NJ area) and watered it thoroughly for 6 weeks and it came in pretty nicely. it's now early march and i just noticed an onslaught of some type of broad leaf weed taking over the lawn. i thought weeds don't grow in the winter time but clearly i'm wrong. how do you handle such a situation? it's still cold around here (40's during day 20's-30's at night). the lawn is new so i don't know the do's and don't. thanks so much.

richard

I've had reasonably good success with the granular type of weed-and-feed fertilizer put out with a spreader. It does a very good job of getting rid of some types of weeds without harming the grass. They also market one that you apply with a hose-end sprayer but it hasn't worked as well for me. The best herbicides seem to be the pre-emergent kind, which does not do as well against weeds already growing, so you may have to spend some time and effort physically removing thos.

Good luck! Oh, and be careful applying the weed-and-feed around flower beds and ornamentals.

I would suggest that you speak to the local home garden center near you. Not the big box stores. They should be able to help you decide what to use. I to live in NJ and already have flowers coming up because of the few warm days we had recently. Or the other way to handle this is to contract with one of the lawn services such a chem-lawn. I used such a service a few years ago and had to stop. The lawn was growing so fast I could not keep up with the cuttings.

thanks for the response. i've learned a bit more since my initial post and here's the story. before they laid the lawn there were many flower beds with all sorts of plants growing in them. they laid a layer of topsoil so none of the seeds sitting in the ground were affected. well a few warm days and boom i'm getting all the "old" perennials coming up. it still thinks there are flower beds up above! i essentially have to treat everything that isn't grass as a weed. probably far too much to stay ahead of so going to go with a chemlawn type service. if i can get this thing under control then i can do it myself. thanks.