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Amish Gardening
  • 16 hours ago
Could a low-cost bag of lawn iron help tackle dandelions and clover while giving grass a greener look? This practical lawn-care guide explains the video’s iron sulfate approach, why it is presented as selective for broadleaf weeds, and why grassy weeds such as crabgrass are a different problem.

Learn about mixing and spraying precautions, application timing, possible soil acidity, and the risk of rust-colored stains on concrete, clothing, and skin. A useful overview of iron sulfate weed control, moss treatment, lawn maintenance, and safer ways to think about homemade weed remedies before treating your yard.
Transcript
00:00There is a bag sitting on the shelf at the hardware store right now, a plain, cheap bag that costs
00:06you $3 or $4, that you have very likely walked past a hundred times, and it will do a thing
00:12you have been paying $40 a bottle to do badly.
00:16Mix a cupful of the powder from that bag into a gallon of water, spray it over your whole lawn
00:22of a morning, and within a day or two, every dandelion and clover patch and plantain in that grass goes
00:30black and dies, while the grass itself, far from being harmed, comes up greener and thicker than it has been
00:37all season, as though you had fed it.
00:40One spraying kills the weeds and feeds the lawn at the very same time, and it costs you pennies.
00:47Now I know how that sounds, and I am not going to ask you to take it on faith. I
00:53am going to tell you exactly why it works, in plain words, and give you every warning you need to
00:59do it safe, for there are a few real ones.
01:02Stay with me, for this is one of those old cheap things that got quietly forgotten the moment someone figured
01:09out how to sell you a dearer one.
01:11Let me tell you first what the stuff is, so there is no mystery in it. It is iron. Plain
01:19iron, the same iron that is in your blood and in the rust on an old gate, dissolved into a
01:25form a plant can drink, and the full name of it is iron sulfate, though you will find it on
01:32the shelf under a humbler name.
01:33It is most often sold as a moss killer, or as lawn iron, for greening up a yellow lawn. Same
01:41mineral, different bag, different price.
01:45Groundskeepers on the golf courses have used it quiet for the better part of a hundred years, and the old
01:51folk knew iron greened a lawn long before that.
01:54There is nothing new here, and nothing strange. It is only a cheap old mineral that has been hiding in
02:01plain sight under the wrong label.
02:04I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version. If you
02:11want it, it is there. I will not mention it again.
02:15Now, here is the why of it, the one thing that makes the whole trick work, and it is a
02:20plain difference between two kinds of plant.
02:23Think of your lawn. The grass has narrow little upright blades, thin as a needle, but a weed in that
02:31grass, your dandelion, your clover, your plantain, has wide, flat, broad leaves, spread out like open hands to catch the
02:40sun.
02:41That is the whole difference, and the iron turns it against the weed.
02:45When you spray the iron water over everything, the broad-leaved weed, with all that wide, flat surface, drinks in
02:53a great heavy dose of the iron all at once, far more than its body can handle, and it is
02:59overwhelmed and poisoned by the sheer flood of it, and in a day or two, it blackens and dies.
03:05But the grass, with its thin, narrow blade, can only take up a little sip of that same spray, for
03:12it has hardly any surface to drink with, and a little sip of iron is not a poison to the
03:18grass.
03:18It is a food. Iron is the very thing a plant uses to make itself green, so the grass takes
03:25that small dose and turns it straight into deep green color and health.
03:30The same spray, on the same morning, floods the broad weed to death and feeds the narrow grass to richness.
03:38You are not aiming at anything. You spray the whole lawn and let the plants sort themselves out by their
03:44own shape.
03:45And that is the thing that sets this apart from the other cheap killers folk reach for, so let me
03:50say a plain word on those.
03:52You have heard that boiling water kills a weed, and it does.
03:56You have heard that straight vinegar kills a weed, and it does.
04:01A handful of salt on a dandelion kills it by morning, true enough.
04:05The trouble with every one of those is that they cannot tell your weed from your grass, nor from your
04:12soil.
04:12The boiling water and the vinegar scorch the good grass right alongside the weed and leave you a brown dead
04:19patch to mend.
04:20And the salt is worse, for salt poisons the very ground so that nothing will grow there for a long
04:27while after, which is the last thing you want in a lawn.
04:31Those are fine for a weed in a crack of the pavement where you want nothing to grow at all,
04:35but in a lawn they cure the weed by wounding the grass, and that is no cure.
04:41The iron is the only one of the cheap old remedies that knows the difference, that can kill the one
04:47while feeding the other, and that is the whole reason it is worth the knowing.
04:53So let me walk you through the doing of it, plain and in order.
04:57The mix is one cup of the iron powder to one gallon of water.
05:02Stir it until the powder is clean gone and the water has turned a dark amber, no grit left in
05:09the bottom.
05:09A gallon so mixed will cover a few hundred square feet, so for an ordinary front yard, you might make
05:17up three or four gallons, and more for a bigger lawn.
05:20You put it in a simple pump sprayer, the kind that cost you a few dollars at the hardware store,
05:26not a hose-end sprayer,
05:28for with the hose-end kind, you cannot hold the strength steady, and that matters here.
05:34Set the nozzle to a fine mist, not a stream, so it settles even over the leaves like a dew,
05:41and does not run off in puddles.
05:43Then you walk the whole lawn in slow, overlapping passes, wetting everything, grass and weeds alike,
05:52for the whole point is that you need not stoop and aim at each weed one at a time.
05:57You mist the lot in ten minutes and let the difference in the plants do the sorting.
06:04That is the beauty of it, that it turns an afternoon of stooping over dandelions into a ten-minute walk.
06:11And the timing matters, so hear it.
06:14You spray in the early morning or the cool of the evening, never in the full heat of a sunny
06:20noon,
06:20for the spray needs time sitting wet on the leaf to be drunk in, and the hot sun dries it
06:27off too fast to work.
06:29The morning is best, for the dew helps it cling.
06:32And you must have a dry spell behind it, for if the rain comes within the day and washes the
06:39spray off the leaves
06:40before they have drunk it, the weeds live, and your work is wasted.
06:45So look at the sky first, and pick a dry, calm morning.
06:50Do not water the lawn for a day after, either.
06:53Give it a full day to do its work undisturbed.
06:57Within the first day, you will see the dandelion leaves curl and darken at the edges,
07:03and the clovers spot and droop, and by the second day,
07:07the broad weeds across that lawn are blackened and dead or dying,
07:12and the grass between them has gone a visible shade deeper green than it was.
07:18Not an overnight magic, but a plain, real change you can see in two days.
07:24One good spraying will handle most of the weeds in a lawn.
07:28If yours is badly overrun, and some weeds shrug off the first pass,
07:34you may give it a second spraying a couple of weeks on,
07:37but mind that three sprayings a season limit I will come to, and do not go past it.
07:44After the weeds have died and blackened, leave them be a week or two,
07:48and the dead leaves break down on their own.
07:51And here is the good part. The grass, now freed of the weeds that were crowding it
07:56and fed by the iron besides, spreads in on its own to fill the bare spots where the weeds had
08:03been,
08:04with no seeding and no patching from you.
08:07You clear the ground and feed the grass, and the grass does the rest, closing over the gaps itself.
08:15Now I must be square with you about the limits of it, for I will not sell you a wonder
08:20it cannot deliver,
08:21and this is the most important honesty in the whole business.
08:25This iron kills the broad-leaved weeds, the dandelion, the clover, the plantain, the chickweed,
08:33the creeping charlie and ground ivy, those wide-leaved invaders, and against those it is a marvel.
08:40But it will not kill a grassy weed. The crabgrass, the quackgrass, the coarse clumping grasses that invade a lawn,
08:49those have narrow blades just like your good grass, and so the iron cannot tell them apart from the lawn
08:55and will not touch them.
08:57If your trouble is crabgrass, this is not your cure,
09:01and anyone who tells you this one bag kills every weed there is, is lying to you,
09:07for it kills the broad-leaved ones and leaves the grassy ones be.
09:12But here is a bonus the label half-hides.
09:16Against moss, this iron is death itself, for moss cannot bear iron at all.
09:22If you have a damp, shady patch where the moss comes back every spring, no matter what,
09:27a single spring turns it black within hours.
09:30So know what it is for. Broad weeds and moss, yes, and wonderfully.
09:36Grassy weeds, no.
09:38Now the warnings, and these are real, so do not skip them.
09:43The first and the biggest, this iron stains, and it stains hard and fast, and more or less forever.
09:50It will put a rust-colored mark on concrete, on brick, on pavers, on the side of your house,
09:57on your clothes, and on your own skin,
09:59and those marks on hard surfaces are the devil to get off once they set.
10:04So keep your spray off the driveway and the walk and the siding,
10:09be careful at the edges of the lawn,
10:11and if some does drift onto the concrete,
10:14rinse it off that very second with water, not in a minute, in a second.
10:18Wear old clothes you do not care for,
10:21and wear gloves, for your bare hands will go orange and stay that way for days.
10:27The second warning.
10:29Keep the children and the pets and the animals off that wet lawn until it has dried,
10:34which takes a couple of hours,
10:36for while it is wet, it will stain their feet and may irritate the skin a little.
10:41Once it is dry, it is harmless enough at this strength,
10:44but wet, keep them off.
10:46And the third, do not overdo it.
10:49This iron makes the soil a little more sour, a little more acid, with every spraying.
10:55A few sprayings a season is fine and does good,
10:58but more than about three times in one year can turn your soil too sour for the grass itself to
11:04thrive,
11:04and then you have traded one trouble for another.
11:08Three times in a season is the safe most,
11:11and if you know your soil is already sour, already on the acid side,
11:16go easy or not at all, and see to the soil first.
11:19A cheap little soil test from the same hardware store will tell you where you stand.
11:25My grandfather kept the greenest lawn and the cleanest of any man I knew,
11:29and he never bought a bottle of weed killer in his life,
11:32for in his day there was hardly such a thing to buy.
11:34I remember him of a cool morning with an old pump sprayer,
11:38walking the grass slow and even,
11:40and I asked him once what was in the can,
11:43for the grass always went so deep a green after.
11:46He said it was iron, only iron,
11:48the same bag he bought for the moss on the north side of the house,
11:52and that iron was a two-edged gift,
11:54poison to the fat-leaved weeds and meat to the grass,
11:58both at once, if a man only knew how to use it.
12:01He said the trick was never in some deer bottle.
12:04The trick was in knowing the plain difference between a broad leaf and a narrow one,
12:08and letting that difference do the work.
12:11I did not understand him as a boy.
12:13I understand him now.
12:14He had the whole of it, and it cost him a few dollars a year.
12:18So let me say plainly who gains by you believing that a weed-free lawn
12:23must cost you $40 a bottle and a four-step yearly program besides.
12:27The companies that sell the bottles and the programs gain,
12:31and they gain year on year,
12:33for a yearly program is a thing you pay for again every single spring, forever.
12:38There is no money in a $3 bag of iron that you buy once or twice,
12:42and that no company can put its private stamp on.
12:45It is not that anyone schemed it so.
12:48It is only that a plain mineral off the shelf cannot be sold to you, dear,
12:52nor sold to you over and over,
12:54and a branded bottle and a subscription can.
12:57So the one is pushed hard,
12:59and the other is left sitting quiet on the bottom shelf
13:02under the Moss Killer label,
13:04waiting for someone to tell you what else it does.
13:06Now you know.
13:08Now tell me this in the comments.
13:10What weed is making your lawn look the worst this year?
13:13The dandelion?
13:14The clover?
13:15The plantain?
13:16The creeping Charlie?
13:17Name it.
13:18And I will tell you straight in the replies
13:20whether this iron will handle it
13:22or whether you have got a grassy weed
13:24that wants a different cure.
13:25And tell me as well
13:26what part of the country you are in
13:29and how your soil runs,
13:31sweet or sour,
13:33for that decides how freely you can use this.
13:37Next time, I will show you the mowing trick
13:39that grows your grass so thick and dense
13:42that the new weed seeds can find no bare ground
13:46to take root in at all,
13:48so that once you have cleaned the lawn with the iron,
13:51it stays clean on its own.
13:54For a weed killed is good,
13:57but a weed that can never get a foothold is better.
14:01But for now,
14:02do not pay $40 to do badly
14:05what $3 of iron does well.
14:08The people who built this country with their hands
14:11knew that,
14:12and we are only just starting to remember it.

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