How To Kill Clover Grass In Your Lawn

If Your Soil Is Compacted

Soil compaction can cause many problems in your lawn. The roots of your grass wont be able to reach down to water and other essential nutrients. Clover has a shallow root system, so it will thrive in these conditions.One of the best ways to relieve soil compaction is by lawn aeration. If you have any questions about lawn aeration contact the professionals at Green Seasons for a free consultation.

How To Prevent The Spread Of Clover

When a Minnesota lawn is healthy, lush and robust, weeds like clover are less likely to infest because they get suffocated by healthy grass. Before clover can enter your lawn, here are some preventative steps you can take to keep your lawn clover-free.

• Keep your lawn well-fed. The best way to prevent the spread of clover is to stop it before it starts. Using a fertilizer four times per year or hiring someone to manage your lawn can help it to stay thick and healthy.
• Mow high. Clover is low-growing, so mowing high and keeping your grass long can prevent sunlight from reaching the soil and allowing weeds to thrive.
• Use a preventative herbicide. Since clover is a cool-season weed, it usually begins growing in cool weather. To prevent it from growing in the spring, use a preventative herbicide before winter comes that stops the spread of seeds. Green Stuff Lawn uses a pre-emergent herbicide.

Whats Causing Clover In My Lawn

There are multiple reasons you could have clover sprouting up in your lawn, most of which have to do with your soil.

• Wrong Soil pH: The ideal soil pHhow alkaline or acidic the soil isfor most lawns is between 6.0 and 7.0. If your lawns soil is too acidic, it will be harder for grass to grow, and much easier for clover. Luckily, you can use soil amendments like lime to balance out the pH.
• Poor Nitrogen Levels: Clover thrives in soil with poor nitrogen levels. Grass needs nitrogen in the soil to grow well, while clover can obtain the nitrogen it needs from the air, effectively making its own fertilizer. Your soil may be low in nitrogen because youve used too much fast-acting fertilizer. While they promote rapid grass growth, they can ultimately lower your soil quality. Switching to organic fertilizer like manure or corn meal can help you avoid this.
• Compacted soil: Compacted soil prevents your grass from getting the nutrientsincluding nitrogenair, and water it needs. Luckily, you can break up compaction with a core or spike aerator.

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Valuable Methods To Kill Clover But Not Grass

Identifying clover is relatively straightforward. If your lawn is spotted with pink or white flowers that attract bees and butterflies, you have clover. Another easy way to determine if it is white clover marring your luscious green lawn is by their leaves. White clover features three leaves that form a petal shape.

Each of these leaves is about half an inch long, with a white crescent shape prominent on each one. White clover generally blooms in the early spring or late fall. The best time to get rid of clover is when it first begins to bloom.

How To Get Rid Of Clover Naturally

Manual removal of clover in your lawn can be very difficult. Since its roots are well spread, and the plant is mixed in with large sections of grass, it can be near impossible to segregate the clover from the grass.

If your looking for more effective natural ways to get rid of clover then check out: How to Get Rid Of Clover Naturally

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Kill The Clover Organically

There is a great organic weed killer on the market that kills weeds in your lawn, without killing the grass. If you spray this organic weed killer on Clover, it will weaken the Clover without harming the surrounding lawn, giving your grass the advantage it needs to outcompete the Clover. Weed Beater Fe is the name of the product and we’ve had great success using it to eliminate Clover and help grass thrive.

Oxygen And Sunlight Are Deprived Of It

To eliminate clover from your lawn, you can cover it with plastic. This will deprive it of the sunlight and oxygen it needs to survive for a few weeks, making it easy for you to pull out later.

Obviously, only try this on large patches of clover otherwise, surrounding grass will most likely suffer damage in the process.

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How To Kill Clover Without Weed Killers

When Clover begins taking over lawns it tells us something very important about our lawn health, and most importantly about the health of our soils.

Also when we begin seeing Clover in lawns, we often see that our lawns themselves may also be turning brown or yellow in colour, as well as possibly having slowed growth and looking generally in poor overall health.

Vinegar Solution Should Be Sprayed

One can easily make some natural, non-toxic weed killer using ingredients that are easy to obtain.

Take one cup of vinegar, one cup of water, and add a single drop of soap then shake it well.

Spray this solution over any patches of clover as the mixture will dry out the leaves and kill off the flowering plant completely in no time at all.

However, take care when using this ingredient as too much usage might damage certain types of grass so spray carefully.

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Planting And Maintaining A Clover Lawn

• Clover lawns can be established by encouraging already-existing clover patches in your landscape, by seeding, or a combination of both.
• It is best seeded in early spring from mid-March to mid-April. It can also be seeded in fall. Tiny clover seeds are difficult to sow evenlyone way to improve your chances is to mix the seed in with some soil, sawdust, or sand. If you don’t have any in your lawn or nearby, you may need to add a bacterial inoculant to promote the best growth if you do already have it in your lawn, however, the inoculant is probably already present in the soil.
• After planting, use a misting attachment to water daily until you can see the seedlings.
• Existing clover patches can be encouraged by mowing with the blades set at 1.52 inches, which favors clover over most traditional turf grasses.
• In the middle of summer, stop mowing to encourage clover to flower and seed.
• Once established, most clovers are low-growing and require little or no mowing, unless you wish to discourage bees by mowing to prevent summer blooms.
• Never apply herbicides to a clover lawn.
• It is a short-lived perennial and may require reseeding approximately once every three years to maintain consistent coverage. It may successfully reseed naturally, however, or wild clovers may move in and take over aging stands.

How To Kill Clover Without Chemicals

by Alec McClennan, on April 28, 2020

Does your lawn look like the lawn pictured below? Are you seeing a lot of white flowers in your lawn and don’t like the look of them? Maybe you’re concerned about the Clover attracting bees and making it more likely for your kids to get stung? If this is your lawn and you’d like to have more grass and less Clover, keep reading to learn more.

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What Is The Best Nitrogen Fertilizer For Lawns

The Top 5 Best Lawn Fertilizers Scotts Green Max Fertilizer. If you want easy and quick green grass, then Scotts Green Max is the fertilizer for you. Miracle-Gro Lawn Food. This is one of the most popular lawn fertilizers for a reason. Safer Brand 9333 Ringer Fertilizer. Milorganite 0636 Fertilizer. Scotts Turf Builder.

The Soil Is Deficient In Important Nutrients Especially Nitrogen

Clover thrives in nitrogen-deficient soil. In fact, white Dutch clover is an indicator plant for low nitrogen meaning that if you see it growing in your lawn, it probably means the soil is low in nitrogen.

A well-timed application of organic spring lawn fertilizer can help bump up nitrogen levels .

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Your Lawn Lacks Essential Nutrients

Other plants in your lawn need essential nutrients such as nitrogen, but clover will grow in nitrogen-deficient soil. If you find an excessive amount of clover growing, it is an indication that your soil is love on nitrogen. The best way to improve your lawns nitrogen levels is to add fertilizers to improve the conditions. If you are not sure about your lawns nutrient levels call the professionals at Green Seasons to help with your lawn fertilization needs.

Reasons Clover Is Taking Over Your Lawn

Across Canada, lawns are being infiltrated by white flowered invaders of the 3-leafed variety, and many homeowners are not happy about this. White clover is a pervasive perennial that will keep coming back every spring if left alone and will choke out your grass plants.You dont need the luck of the Irish to get rid of the clover in your lawn, but you do need to know what conditions allow it to thrive and outperform your grass. Eradicating clover requires time and a lot of patience. Know your enemy! If you want to get rid of the clover, learn how to give your grass the growing edge! The experts at Nutri-Lawn Vancouver can help you create the lawn you want.

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Why Do You Have So Much Clover On Your Lawn

You will find clover in lawns where the grass is turning yellowish. This is due to the low percentage of nitrogen available in the lawn, which is very essential for the grass to grow. On the other hand, clover weed loves low nitrogen soil and thrives in it. Clover weed is a legume of plant-like beans that extract nitrogen from the air, so it doesnt require nitrogen in the soil.

So if you are seeing clover weed in your lawn then it is an indication that your lawn is low in nitrogen and needs fertilization. But before you fertilize your lawn, do a proper test of the soil and see what is the soil quality and what other nutrients your soil needs

There are some other factors that help clover weed to grow in your lawn. Lets talk about them in detail:

Factors that help clover weed to grow

• Bad pH level if your lawn has a bad pH level then clover weed will love to grow in your lawn and will establish in your lawn very quickly. Your lawn can become acidic or alkaline due to the flushing of essential nutrients due to heavy rainfall or excess watering. The best way to balance the pH level of your soil, apply garden lime to the soil. The lime will restore the pH of the soil and make it healthy for the grass to grow. Keep in mind that restoring the pH level of the soil by applying lime will take some time, so you need to be patient to see the result in your lawn.

How To Get Rid Of Clover In Your Lawn Safely

Clover, with its nitrogen pulling ability, is hugely beneficial for your lawn. However, when it invades turf grasses, it spreads rampantly and chokes out the desirable grass due to its extensive root system. Additionally, clover flowers also attract pollinators like bees, which can be a problem for those with bee sting allergies.

While you can prevent clover infestation by mowing high, using a slow-release fertilizer, and addressing soil compaction issues, infestation may still be inevitable. In case clover weeds take over your lawn, the safest ways to remove them include manually uprooting the clover, using vinegar, water, and dish soap mixture, or to increase nitrogen content in the soil.

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Why Get Rid Of White Clover In Your Lawn

If youve got an overabundance of white clover, that often means your lawns are poorly fertilised. White clover loves fixing nitrogen levels, and it does this by spreading far and wide over your once-healthy lawn.

Its the spreading thats the problem. Many homeowners want lush, green lawns not clover-covered ones with white flowers. Its a personal choice, but people ask what weed spray kills clover because they just dont like having it take over.

In saying that, its worth being aware of the benefits of cloverbefore you send it packing. Clover can feed the honey bees, crowd out weeds, and provide free fertiliser for your lawns.

Use Corn Gluten To Kill It

There are many organic remedies to prevent unwanted clover from growing in your lawn, including corn gluten meal.

One cup of this grass seed herbicide for every ten square feet should keep things under control, as long as you miss a few spots .

We recommend spreading five cups of corn gluten meal evenly over the surface of a quarter of your lawn. Then take a rake and make three rows across the seeded area where you want the clover to grow back.

This will help control the spread of your problem clover seeds. Some do not like the way corn gluten meal looks in their yard, so they prefer to use diatomaceous earth instead which may work equally well.

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You Should Smother It

Clover can survive just fine when grown away from other plants, particularly large grasses like the common lawn variety.

Lawn turfgrass will die if you try to smother it with a plastic sheet, but in most cases, it grows back quickly and is little more than a minor inconvenience.

Clover planted near trees or shrubs will also grow even outside of the typical lawn environment as long as growing conditions are good and too much moisture isnt present because clover does not tolerate waterlogged soils.

Why Some People Want Clover In Their Lawn

On a side note, it might surprise you to know that some people actually choose to add clover to their lawn. This is due to the fact that clover prevents weeds, fertilises your lawn by adding nitrogen, attracts bees, is soft to walk on, makes your lawn appear greener and shades the soil well. In fact, back in the 1950s and 60s, the optimum lawn mix was around 20% clover. For all these reasons, many people encourage the growth of clover in their lawn and even add in additional microclover to give more uniform clover coverage.

However, if you prefer the look of a smooth, velvety lawn without the distraction of clover flowers and wide leaves, youll need to thoroughly remove this prolific weed. Heres how to do it.

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How To Prevent Clover

Clover weed is very tough to remove from your lawn once it has established itself. So preventing clover weed in the first place is very crucial to have a healthy and beautiful lawn.

There are some things that you can do to take proper care of your lawn and prevent clover from developing in your lawn. Lets talk about them in detail:

• Test your soil the first thing to prevent clover weed in your lawn is to test it to see what essential nutrients it already has and what it needs to be healthy and support grass growth. Another thing to see is the pH level of the soil as clover weed tends to grow on an acidic lawn so see if your lawn is acidic or not. Maintain a pH level between 6.5 to 7.5 as this is an ideal condition for grasses to grow.

• Overseeding By overseeding your lawn you make the lawn thick and healthy and there will be no space for the clover weed to grow as it grows very low to the ground.

• Aerating aerating your lawn is very necessary to prevent clover weed as all the essential nutrients cannot get to the roots of the grass and make your lawn thin. On the other side, clover weed thrives in compacted soil as it has very small root systems which tend to be on the very top of the soil, so it can take water and nutrients from the soil very easily.

Is Clover A Weed

Clover is generally considered to be a weed because its usually an unwanted plant. Clover is a wild plant that grows in competition with cultivated plants, usually the grass in your lawn. Although the roots are usually shallow, clover spreads quickly. It can choke out the grass by stealing the essential nutrients from your lawns roots. Most people tend to want to get rid of clover because it grows in dark leafy patches that are higher than the rest of your lawn.

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How To Identify Clover

Clover is a perennial plant that grows almost everywhere in lawns, alleys, flower beds, and even vegetable gardens. It is quite easy to identify with its leaves which are made up of three leaflets or its small white flowers in round clusters.

White clover is one of the most common weeds in gardens, it can grow in many different places, but it is especially found in sparse lawns where competition from grass is low. White clover grows in a creeping fashion and develops roots where a stem node touches the ground. The flowering period for clover begins in April and ends in September. The fight against clover must be done throughout the year.