Unless you take them out by the roots every time you see them, dandelions will quickly spread their seeds to every square inch of your garden's soil plot. Fortunately, in contrast to chemical pesticides or smaller trowels, dandelion diggers with long handles on them allow you to completely and efficiently remove a given dandelion without you even having to bend over. To help you with preventing damage to nearby plants in your garden while you're using a dandelion digger, remember these three tips.

Wait Until Just After A Brief Rain Shower To Begin Your Work

If the soil in question is too hard and dry, it'll be significantly harder for you to get a grip on a dandelion's roots with your digger. On the other hand, if the soil is extremely damp from a recent thunderstorm, disturbing it too much will tend to shift the positions of your nearby plants' roots more than what is healthy.

Therefore, try to delay your dandelion digging job until just after a relatively shallow rain shower. This way, the soil texture you come across will be just right for uprooting.

Set A Layer Of Mulch Around The Stems Of Your Most Vulnerable Plants

After all the plants you want in your garden have already grown tall enough to have leaves well established above the soil, mulch is very useful for depriving hidden weed seeds of sunlight. Additionally, even if you don't want to cover your whole garden, surrounding your most vulnerable plants' stems with small rings of mulch is a great way to discourage excess soil disruption while you're uprooting dandelions.

Immediately Fill The Holes You Create With High Quality Garden Soil

The more exposed and untested soil you leave exposed in your garden via holes, the more opportunity there is for hidden weed seeds to sprout up and force you to start your work all over again. To both mitigate this possibility and increase the overall health of your garden, quickly fill up all the holes your weed digger makes with a high quality cup of garden soil you bought at your favorite hardware store.

In contrast to normal soil, specialized garden soil is packed with nutrients that your plants need in order to grow to large sizes and live long lives. Since the soil won't have any hidden weed seeds in it, it's also good for covering up the soil that hosted the weed. Any seed needs sunlight to grow and only the topmost layers of a soil bed get plenty of it. The more that hidden weed seeds get buried, the less likely it is that they'll ever grow.

If your weed problem is out of control, you'll want to do additional reading on possible solutions.