When is a weed a weed?

Weeds can be tricky little fellas. Some weeds look like lovely flowers and some plants that aren’t weeds can look like terrible menaces, when in fact they’re not going to do any harm.

Besides not looking like a weed at all, a weed can be hard to identify at some stages, for example a newly sprouted weed may not have any weed-like trademarks. If you can’t find and sort the weeds from the real plants you may one, pull up real plants, two, chemically treat non-weeds, or three, leave the weeds growing which is bad for your real plants.

How to handle weeds

The best way is to get a great weed guide book, or a gardening book with a weed section. Pictures are much easier than text descriptions obviously. Weeds (A Golden Guide from St. Martin’s Press) is a good book. It’s simple with drawn (but well-done) images and locations of common weeds. Also this book covers some weed benefits, which is cool.

Your local extension office is the best source for weed info specific to your area. Most offer weed booklets with full color images and tips as well.

You can also browse weeds online. Some decent weed fighting sites include…

• Penn State Weed Management
• Identifying Early-Season Weed Species
• Identification: Weed Photo Gallery
• Weed Alert

[image via stock.xchng]