About
Qualified to spray the strong stuff. Which is why I’ll tell you not to.
I’m The Weed Guy, and I’m qualified to spray professional weedkiller. Mostly what that buys you is an honest sense of what the strong stuff can’t do. It can’t do a lot of things. So plenty of the answers on this site end with put the bottle down: wait for the growing season, pull it out instead, or leave that one well alone.
What a spraying ticket is actually good for
It means I can buy and use products that are not sold to the public, and that I’m held to the label rules that come with them. Neither half is much of a boast. The useful part is what falls out of it. When I pick up a bottle off the shop shelf I know what has been left out of it, and when something you read about turns out to be a product you are not permitted to buy, I can say so before you spend an evening hunting for it.
Stronger is also not the same as better on a driveway. Used properly, the amateur version of the same active ingredient usually finishes the same weed. A weedkiller that failed almost never failed on strength. It was the wrong product, the wrong month, or the wrong weather.
The rules the pages follow
Weeds only, any surface. Not moss, not lawn feed, not a general gardening site.
Systemic or it doesn’t count: if a method only burns the top off, the page says so.
The shelf gets marked honestly. A lot of what is sold for this job is contact-only in a big bottle.
The half of the job that is knowing when to leave it
Spraying is the last step, not the first, and on some jobs it is the wrong step altogether. Glyphosate needs the plant to be actively growing and needs a dry spell afterwards to travel down. Hit a dormant weed in November and you have wet the paving. Hit one an hour before the rain and you have washed it off. Even when everything goes right it takes two to four weeks, so anything promising a dead root by teatime is selling you something.
Then there are the plants that change the answer completely. Giant hogweed sap blisters skin in sunlight, so it is not a knapsack-and-shorts job. Japanese knotweed is specialist, legally loaded ground where the honest answer is a survey and not a bottle. Ragwort carries a control duty in law that is worth reading before you decide anything. Water has its own rules about what may go anywhere near a pond, ditch or stream.
Where a page takes you near any of that, it stops and tells you to check before you touch it. That is the one thing a certificate is genuinely useful for on a website: knowing where the edges are, and saying so instead of selling past them.
Two links, and that is the whole of the business
Exactly two products on this site carry a link I earn a commission from: a glyphosate concentrate, and the knapsack sprayer you would put it through. That is it. Every other product named anywhere on here is described and not sold, with no button, so a page has no reason to talk itself into recommending one.
Where a link does sit, the page says so plainly right beside it, and there is a disclosure page in the footer. No weedkiller brand sponsors this site, sees a page before it goes up, or has any say in what it concludes. Which is what lets a page say a popular product is a waste of your money and leave it at that.
Who runs this site
This site is operated by That Guy, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom.
It is on the page because of what the subject is. Weedkiller is a chemical you handle around your own children, pets and drains, and with a few species the law has an opinion too. If a website is going to tell you what to put down and what to leave alone, you are entitled to know who is publishing it.
How the answers get written
Every page says what I would do on my own drive, and nothing I wouldn’t. A figure on here, a concentration, a timing, a cost, comes from something you can go and check: the product label, an official body, a published cost guide. I don’t run comparison tests, so I never claim to have. Where a page describes how a product behaves in use, that is what owners report, and it says as much.
What you won’t find here
A miracle. Nothing kills an established root overnight. You also won’t find the salt and bleach folklore written up as a clever free trick, because it pits your paving and leaves the root sitting there ready to go again. And there is no service at the end of any of this. I don’t come out, I don’t quote, and I don’t cover an area. You do the job. I tell you how.
Right. What are you dealing with?
Start where I’d start: what actually kills a weed down to the root, and why the last three things you tried came straight back.
What actually kills weeds