Weeds can quickly take over your landscape beds and parking lot areas if left unattended. Pre-emergent products are sufficient for most weeds. Some of the products that we recommend for pre-emergent weed control in landscape beds are Surflan and Snapshot. Surflan is a liquid product it orange in color and can be applied right next to plants. Snapshot is a granular pre-emergent product that should be used before mulch installation.
Hand weeding landscape beds or herbicide control?
Post-emergent weed control consists of a Glyphosate product or manual removal of weeds. If you are maintaining your landscape beds on a regular basis, minimal hand pulling and herbicide is necessary. If you let your landscape go, it may take quite a bit of work to get it back into shape. We recommend manual removal of weeds before any herbicide application. If you spray large weeds with a herbicide product, you will still have a dead weed in your landscape. Pulling weeds by hand will remove the undesirable invader and make it easier to spray a Glyphosate product. Weeding beds first will drastically reduce the amount of chemical needed to control the remaining weeds.
When spraying weeds in your landscape, make sure that you do not spray non-target plants. Over-spray or leaching can damage surrounding plants. Plants that come into direct contact with a Glyphosate product will die. There is nothing that can be done to reverse the application.