General Discussion & Chat: pre-emergent herbicides, 1 by gardenwife

gardenwife wrote:
A combination of the two is what I'd do. An herbicide will only kill plants, not keep new seeds from sprouting. A pre-emergent will not kill seedlings, but will keep seeds from sprouting in the first place. There will always be the odd weed seed blowing into the gravel, so a pre-emergent will keep the weeds away once you've killed any plants that had already sprouted.

If you don't care about your flowers re-seeding in their beds, you could use Preen in them to keep weed seeds from sprouting in them.

By the way...We've seen much, much better results with Spectracide than we ever did with any of the Roundup formulas. Once the herbicide kills the weeds, they shrivel up and almost disappear - they get crunchy and crumble away.

Spectracide started turning the weeds brown within hours and we rarely had to re-apply it. It's even worked on an established bed of Boston ivy! There's just a few small spots we need to hit again.