Have you ever wondered why lawn fertilization services put a small yellow flag up warning your kids and pets to stay off the lawn? It all comes down to economics. It is cheaper and easier to combine concentrated fertilizer with an herbicide so they only have to visit and spray the lawn once. If one home on the route wants a weed control application, the tank is often filled with both fertilizer and herbicide and everybody gets the same thing. That is part of the reason most services don’t fertilize the rest of your landscape plants at the same time. Herbicides designed to kill lawn weeds might not work well with your vegetable garden, flowerbed or ground cover. The combination is not applied to your other plants and so you either have to do that yourself, hire somebody else or make them go without fertilization. The lawn gets fed along with a blanket coverage of herbicide but if your whole lawn doesn’t need a weed kill application, why expose yourself to all those chemicals?
There is a government mandate to place the little yellow warning signs following an herbicide application. You should heed that advise and keep your kids and pets off the lawn. For how long? That debate continues on. Some will say that once the herbicide is dry it is safe. Others claim the chemicals stay in the lawn for much longer. The time it takes lawn chemicals to break down varies greatly. Some stay for a long time. If you play in the yard how much makes its way into the home on shoes or your pet’s paws? It is difficult to say exactly. The more chemicals sprayed on a lawn, the more chemicals make it into your home.
We do know a few things for sure:
- Plants need to be fed.
- People want a weed free lawn.
- Chemicals can help reduce weeds but they cannot kill all dormant weed seeds without doing harm to the lawn and the environment. So weeds will continue to grow, particularly if your lawn isn't healthy enough to crowd out weeds.
- Herbicides and pesticides are dangerous (just read the labels the manufactures put on them warning of the dangers).
- Herbicides of almost all kinds are found in surface water, groundwater and even treated drinking water.
So what makes Virid different?
- Virid believes the best way to control weeds is with a healthy lawn. Lush turf keeps most weed seeds from germinating and reaching the light of day.
- Virid's H2grO System distributes very dilute amounts of nutrients with each watering. We target EPA drinking water standards. We can do this with frequent feedings (70 times a growing season based on watering every 3 days for 7 months)
- Virid does not apply herbicides with each fertilizer application.
Virid is:
- Safer for kids and pets (Virid targets EPA Drinking water standards)
- Safe for vegetable gardens and fruit trees
- Safe for grass (It does not burn the leaves)