Michael Jordan's Weblog

After trying various methods, I think I've finally figured out how to do this right every time. Not that it's all that complex, mind you. But I think a lot of people don't pull out the entire Dandelion because it's more difficult than extracting other kinds of weeds -- they give it their "normal weed" type effort and then move on. The problem with that approach is that with normal weeds you can just loosen the soil and the weed comes up, root and all intact.

But I think that Dandelions are specially evolved to not give up their root system like other weeds. You loosen the dirt, pull on the tops, and 9 out of 10 times the tops just break off. The result will look like this:

At this point, resist all temptation to give up -- you must dig in. Dig into the dirt and get the root. This can take some effort, even for a small root like this one:

Do not give in to the temptation to simply mow over your Dandelions -- my neighbor did so and TWO DAYS LATER they looked like this:

And by the way, I highly recommend this sort of weed-puller tool to go along with your gloves: