Reacting to weeds? Here’s why you need a pro-active, year round, weed management approach.

Soil Cycle

Soil provides nutrients and water storage to give weeds the opportunity to grow. Whereas clean surfaces have no nutrients to offer opportunistic weeds.

Throughout the year, organic debris is left on the surface in the form of grass cuttings, hedge clippings and leaves. these decompose, giving weeds a chance to grow.

Collecting this debris is a simple way to disrupt the cylce.

Once the soil is firmly established around path edges, kerbs or in gaps between block paving, it must be removed by another method… Weedbrushing.

Weedbrushing can be done in winter. The annual plants are gone, so it’s easier to see accumulated soil and established weeds. Removing the soil now gives you a head start, as new weeds won't begin growing until spring. If they have nothing to grow in, you have won half the battle already!

Plant Life Cycle

This process is continuous. A plant’s life begins with the seed, and ends by producing more seeds to start the cycle again. With water, right temperature and right location, the seed grows.

Our best chance to interrupt this cycle is to eliminate the plant before it seeds. Most seeds will begin to grow in the spring and will be dropping seeds by late summer. The best time to kill the plant is in spring, when it first shoots up and is weakest.

A plant needs; Light, Air, Water, and Nutrients to survive. We can kill a plant by depriving it of any of these things. The easiest one to go for is light.

How can we do this?

• Covering the plant so light can’t reach it.
• Destroying the chlorophyll which processes sunlight.

Destroying the chlorophyll can be achieved by exposing the plant to high temperatures.
A weed only has to be briefly heated to around 80°C to suffer terminal damage. This exposure bursts the cells in the leaf, causing starvation.

Using this knowledge, we can determine the most effective strategy for weed elimination is a year-round Integrated approach; consisting of

• Soil deprivation in winter,
• Thermal control in spring
• Sweeping throughout the year.

With this approach we can disrupt both the soil cycle and the plant lifecycle, greatly reducing weeds and improving surface performance

For information on year-round, cost effective surface maintenance that won’t be stopped by the rain - call Kersten;

www.kerstenuk.com
info@kerstenuk.com
0118 9869 253