Menu
Who wouldn’t enjoy pushing a lawnmower on a beautiful day?
It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures. However, maybe your enjoyment of your yard work has been ruined by the sudden appearance of clover?
While some clover may look aesthetically pleasing, it is actually an invasive weed. It doesn’t look like grass and can take over the entire area if left untreated.
Luckily, there are some things you can learn about how to get rid of clover on your lawn naturally.
What causes clover in lawns?
If your lawn’s pH is unbalanced or you have poor nitrogen levels, you can expect an infusion of clover to take over your well-maintained yard.
Most often, this is because of simple errors like mowing the grass too short, underwatering/overwatering, or using the wrong grass type that allows clover to thrive in the off-season.
Integrating a solid lawn care calendar into your routine may be the first step to preventing the spread and learning how to kill clover.
There are three primary types of clover you can expect to find on your lawn.
When you are discovering how to kill clover without killing grass, you should read up on each to ensure you are using the proper method:
Now that you know a bit more about clovers in general, let’s get into the natural solutions for removing them from your yard.
We are using non-chemical methods because we want to ensure the safety of friends, family, pets, guests, and the quality of your law.
Switch from mowing your grass short and up the ante to above 3 inches. When you are learning how to remove clover from the lawn, keep in mind that it prefers grass under 3 inches.
Once the grass has more room to stretch and soak up nutrients, the clover losses in the battle for resources. This effectively kills out clover weeds in lawns before they get the chance to spread seeds.
How to kill white clover especially has a lot to do with the amount of water your lawn receives. Watering deeply is an excellent solution for eliminating clover in lawns.
You are shooting for 1 inch of water, about enough to fill a cat food can. White clover prefers nitrogen from the air. Overwatering it effectively drowns it before it can grow.
Though not our favorite method, manually doing the labor is highly effective.
This is a good solution for smaller patches of clovers and not for when it is covering a vast yard or making its way into hard-to-reach areas.
You could try making it a weed-pulling party and holding a BBQ for friends with 15-20 minutes of labor as payment.
The goal is to learn how to get rid of white clovers without destroying the lawn, as chemicals would do.
Most of the time, clover has come into your yard because of unbalanced pH or low nitrogen levels. Using an organic, slow-release, a nitrogen-rich fertilizer will ensure your soil is far less attractive to clover in the future.
It may sound like a dangerous clover killer for lawns, but smothering the weeds is one of the best ways to get rid of clover.
You can smother your lawn using plastic bags, sheeting, or even some thicker fabric like coffee bean bags. Just be sure to use bricks or heavy stones to keep the sheeting in place.
One good wind gust can ruin this strategy.
This is a suitable method in case you want to get rid of clover patches in lawns instead of the entire yard.
The reason is that when you remove oxygen and sunlight, you are also killing anything else natural in the area requiring those nutrients. This is similar to smothering, but you want to use black plastic that eliminates sunlight exposure.
Vinegar is the solution to so many natural remedies. It works as a homemade clover killer by drying out the clover’s leaves.
When you mix it with a natural dish soap, which acts as a way to ensure the vinegar sticks to the plant. Killing clover with vinegar is a highly effective method, but you need to make sure you are not spraying other plants.
Test it out on a small section first to ensure you have the right mixture.
Killing clover in lawn with corn meal gluten works by preventing the clover’s growth. You are essentially stunting the proliferation of the weed before it can get its grip on your grassy areas.
This shouldn’t harm any of your existing nearby grass, and you can pick up corn gluten meal pretty much anywhere you shop for plants or through an online store.
There are plenty of organic weed killers on the market that work exceptionally well for clover as well.
The trick for getting rid of clover in lawn organically with a natural weed killer is to test it out first. You do not want to spray or spread something that will damage the rest of your yard.
Consider three important aspects if you would rather learn how to prevent clover in lawns before it takes over.
You want to reduce:
Many people find clover to be attractive.
Like you have a wildflower field in your front yard. This is an easy-to-maintain type of yard that does not need extra care, fertilizers, mowing, and other labor-intensive activities.
Not only that, but clover attracts bees and pleasant wildlife while choking out other weeds from growing.
It comes down to what you want at your personal property and what kind of maintenance schedule you are willing to commit to in the long term.
How to get rid of clover in lawns naturally doesn’t have to be a challenging puzzle to solve.
We hope these easy-to-follow steps will ensure you can get the yard of your dreams and eliminate the need for any kind of extra chemical that can harm your property or loved ones.
In the end, it is all about consistency and how you want your property to look.
Good luck and happy gardening!
