This Blog section is for news about Rainbow & Brown products and their application but especially new products.
12 Nov
In answer to a question about Grassmate from a customer about control of broadleaf weeds in lawns,
Our product GrassMate is an excellent product for removing all broadleaf species, including clovers etc, from a lawn without damage to the grass.
For your situation a rate equivalent to 2L/Ha is about right. So for a 1.5 acre lawn, that's a total of 1.2L of GrassMate in as much water as it takes for your sprayer to cover the whole lawn. You can add a wetter/penetrant (e.g. SprayWetter - see website) at 90ml per 90L tank, to maximise herbicide performance and to reduce the rain risk period to under an hour. But it's not essential if growing conditions are good at time of spraying, and rain's not threatening.
GrassMate is very popular for use on large lawns, parks, recreational fields and sports grounds.
If you decide to use it, first just spray a small test area at the required rate, and observe the results over 7-10 days. Then as long as you're happy with what you're seeing, it's OK to spray the lot. The recommended application rate of 2L/Ha is equivalent to 2ml on 10 square metres, so if you use a small hand sprayer containing 2ml of GrassMate and spray it over a 5m x 2m test area, you'll get an accurate picture of the performance to expect when you later spray the whole lawn. The test is just to be absolutely certain that your grass species is 100% safe for GrassMate use. It will be, I'm very confident, but best to take the cautious route at first; lawns are expensive and I don't want to get an invitation from you to replant yours!
By the way, the product that was suggested, MSF600, is not the ideal choice. It would kill the weeds, but there'd almost certainly be too much grass damage to be tolerable unless your grasses were all native species. Maybe even then.
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Every NZ farm that uses hazardous substances needs an up-to-date chemical inventory and a current safety data sheet (SDS) for each product, kept where workers and emergency services can get to them. When WorkSafe checked 680 sheep, beef and dairy farms in late 2025, missing SDSs and inventories were behind 94% of the improvement notices issued. B..
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A wetter helps spray droplets spread across a leaf and stay there, instead of beading up and rolling off before the herbicide gets in. Use a non-ionic wetter for everyday spraying, and step up to an organosilicone wetter for waxy, hairy, dusty or stressed weeds. Always check the herbicide label first, because it tells you whether a wetter is need..
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Spring is the only time of year a wasp queen is on her own. She's out of hibernation, building a small nest by herself and feeding her first larvae with no workers to back her up. Catch her now and that nest never forms, which means no colony of thousands and no new queens next autumn.
✓Queens are active from early spring, roughly September to..
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