Kaylee Browning

Shortly after moving into our home that was beautifully landscaped with a recently leveled yard by the prior owner, I found myself spending an entire afternoon pulling these grass-like weeds from our lawn and plant beds. In two days, the lawn was infested again and I realized we had a problem.

Thus my loathing for sedge weeds began.

Nutsedge and Kyllinga are warm season invasive perennial weeds that emerge in late spring and grow throughout the summer. The foliage dies back at the first frost, but this is not their end. This pernicious plant’s secret to cold weather are runners (rhizomes) and nutlets (tubers) that survive in the soil throughout the winter.

Once it warms up again, the sedge is stronger than before with an established footprint for another year of headaches. Sedge thrives in moist soils, usually caused by poor drainage, excessive rainfall, or poor irrigation practices. It is typically interspersed in turfgrasses and found in plant beds, ditch banks, and low-lying wet areas.

Why can you just not pull a sedge from your beds like you do other unwanted plants? A single plant can produce over 100 rhizomes and tubers throughout a year. Many of those tubers are dormant and do not have foliage. Pulling one mature plant will create a stress response in the remaining rhizome and stimulate germination of dormant tubers. The established tubers, or nutlets, will rapidly sprout foliage and intensify the problem.

Instead of pulling mature sedges, an effective removal method is physically digging them out by hand if you take care to remove all underground rhizomes and tubers. Physical control is difficult because sedge can be re-established from remaining underground structures.

Make sure to check back continually and remove new growth as needed. New tubers can spread in as little as four weeks from a new shoot.

Nutsedge is a continual problem to turfgrass because it is competitive for water, nutrients, and space. This competition with our landscape is why we want it out of our lawns and gardens.

But how did it get there to begin with? It may have spread from rhizomes and tubers, as described above. Perhaps it flowered and seeded, and those made it to your lawn to germinate and sprout. Or maybe, there were seeds or nutlets in the new topsoil or sod you just put in your yard.