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How to Control Dandelions

What makes dandelion removal from lawns so difficult? Well, enjoy the best of both worlds. Above-ground, their seeds ride the wind currents, poised to drop into the slightest opening in your lawn to propagate the species. Meanwhile, below-ground, dandelions strike down a taproot up to 10" long. Pulling the taproot as a means of dandelion removal is problematic. Thick but brittle, the taproot easily fractures - and any fraction of the taproot that remains in the ground will regenerate.

How to Kill Dandelions: Pulling Them

If you're hard-headed enough to want to try to pull dandelions, despite the difficulty just mentioned, here's how to proceed:

• To facilitate weeding, water the lawn first (weeds are more easily extricated from wet soil).
• Make an incision into the soil, down along the side of the dandelion taproot, using a knife, screwdriver or similar tool (tools designed specifically for dandelion removal can be found in home improvement stores).
• Wiggle the tool to loosen the dandelion taproot
• Using the ground as a fulcrum, try to pry up the dandelion weed.
• Get a good grip on the dandelion leaves (as many of them as you can close your hand over) and use them as your "handle" on which to tug.
• Give the dandelion weed a gentle tug to see if the taproot is yielding.
• If the taproot is yielding, remove the dandelion weed from the soil. Otherwise, make further incisions around the taproot, wiggle and continue to tug gently at the dandelion leaves.

Preventive Dandelion Control

Promoting lawn health is the best method of dandelion control. Don't think of your lawn grass as a passive partner, which has to be rescued from dandelions after the fact. If managed properly, your lawn can compete effectively against dandelions and other weeds, alleviating the need for laborious dandelion removal.

Follow these lawn-care tips:

Leave grass clippings on your lawn. They will act as a mulch to prevent weed seeds from germinating. The benefits of grass clippings to your lawn, under the right conditions, are numerous.

Mow "high", leaving the lawn grass at a height of 2 1/2"-3". This will allow the lawn grass to "protect its own turf" better, depriving dandelions of the light they need.

Don't let bare spots remain uncovered for long; else you're just inviting the invasion of opportunistic dandelions. In the fall, fill in those bare spots by over seeding.

Plastic - Impact on Oceans and Beaches

"The success of the plastic bag has meant a dramatic increase in the amount of sacks found floating in the oceans where they choke, strangle, and starve wildlife and raft alien species around the world.

Plastic bags have gone "from being rare in the late 80s and early 90s to being almost everywhere from Spitsbergen 78° North [latitude] to Falklands 51° South [latitude], but they will probably be washing up in Antarctica within the decade."

Furthermore:

• Plastic bags are among the 12 items of debris found most often in coastal cleanups, according to the Center for Marine Conservation
• Plastic bags wrap around living corals quickly "suffocating" and killing them according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land.

Take a walk along any beach anywhere in the world and washed ashore will be many polythene plastic bags, bottles and containers, plastic drums, expanded polystyrene packing, polyurethane foam pieces, pieces of polypropylene fishing net and discarded lengths of rope. Together with traffic cones, disposable lighters, vehicle tyres and toothbrushes, these items have been casually thrown away on land and at sea and have been carried ashore by wind and tide.

These larger items are the visible signs of a much larger problem. These big items do not degrade like natural materials. At sea and on shore under the influence of sunlight, wave action and mechanical abrasion they simply break down slowly into ever smaller particles.

A single one litre drinks bottle could break down into enough small fragments to put one on every mile of beach in the entire world. These smaller particles are joined by the small pellets of plastic which are the form in which many new plastics are marketed and which can be lost at sea by the drum load or even a whole container load. These modern day “marine tumbleweeds” have been thrown into sharp focus, not only by the huge quantities removed from beaches by dedicated volunteers, but by the fact that they have been found to accumulate in sea areas where winds and currents are weak.

Bags and small plastic pieces can entangle marine animals causing them to drown. They can also be swallowed by marine animals like whales and turtles, causing them to starve….

Wildlife in the oceans is increasingly falling victim to human waste, with virtually all dead sea-birds found to have eaten litter carried in the water, according to a new study.

Scientists measuring the amount of waste found in fulmars discovered that 96 per cent of the birds had fragments of plastic in their stomachs. The figure was almost double the amount discovered in the early 1980s

The issue of plastic debris is one that needs to be urgently addressed. At the personal level we can all contribute by avoiding plastics in the things we buy and by disposing of our waste responsibly. Obviously though, there is a need to make ship owners and operators, offshore platforms and fishing boat operators more aware of the consequences of irresponsible disposal of plastic items.