It has been an especially dry summer this year. Our lawn is a nice crispy shade of brown, which suits me fine, since brown grass doesn’t need to be mowed. The weeds, on the other hand, are thriving. We had quite a few wild carrots (Queen Anne’s Lace) dotting our otherwise lifeless front yard and it was getting quite unsightly to the point where I was expecting by-law enforcement to come knocking on my door again.
The problem with this particular weed is its strong, deep tap-root. It is difficult to pull the entire weed out by hand. I tried. Most broke off leaving the roots behind. Not good. I needed something that would be able to remove the weeds by their roots.
I purchased a Fiskars weeder and pulled out about two dozen wild carrots in about 15 minutes, barely breaking a sweat on an extremely hot and humid day.
I did not realize that Fiskars makes several different models of weed pullers, and I did not do any research. I was in a particular store on other business, took a quick look in the gardening department and more or less bought it on impulse, although I was familiar with the Fiskars name. The model I bought has a circular “plug” that cuts around the weed, with a single serrated blade that grabs the root as you use the foot lever to pry it out of the ground. It does leave a small hole in the lawn, but I consider that to be bonus aeration.
Other models have three or four blades to grab the weeds and there are numerous competitors, like the one highlighted below, that offer similar designs.
When I was a young lad, it was my job to pull dandelions using a hand tool. That worked well enough. We lived in a suburban neighborhood where everyone’s lawn was a carpet so I only had to pull perhaps a dozen weeds per week– not exactly back-breaking work. Now that I live next to a woodlot, I don’t expect to ever have a weed-free lawn. And the use of chemicals isn’t even a consideration since we live on a watershed. However, having this kind of tool, where weeds are easily pulled out by the roots with minimal effort, will make it easier to reduce the number of weeds without posing any threat to the environment.
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