Accountability
Corrections
We tell readers that our product facts come from EPA-registered labels rather than from retail listings. That is only worth something if the times we got it wrong are visible too.
Below is every correction we know of: 21 of them our own errors, the rest cases where a retail listing or a search result contradicted the product's own label. Nothing here is ever removed.
We got it wrong
- What we had
- This page recommended a preventive fungicide more readily than the sources it cited support — a product card for lawns with a pink snow mold history, and a FAQ presenting late-autumn fungicide as the standard answer for recurring problems. It also stated that pink snow mold leaves truly dead spots while gray is merely cosmetic. Both Penn State pages it listed had been sitting in the source array unread.
- What the label says
- Penn State's position is narrower in a direction that costs the reader less: gray snow mold usually can be managed in lawns without using fungicides, and most mature turfgrass tends to recover quickly when temperatures warm and leaf growth resumes in spring. They reserve fungicide for high-value turf, such as golf course putting greens, tees, and fairways; sports fields; and recently seeded lawns — and that last item is now the product's stated use, because a lawn seeded the same autumn has no mature crowns to recover with. On the two types, Penn State does record pink damaging leaves, stems and crowns rather than leaves alone, but gives the same recovery outlook for both, so the page no longer describes pink as leaving truly dead spots.
- How we found it
- Gate check 8t, added the same week, flagged that this page cited two Penn State snow-mold publications and named neither. Reading them produced a correction that runs against our own commercial interest, which is the useful test: an unread citation had been sitting under a recommendation to buy something the source says most readers do not need.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /snow-mold-treatment
We could not back it up
- What we had
- Six pages cited Texas A&M AgriLife's Turfgrass Weeds page. It is a weed-identification photo gallery — about four thousand words of plant descriptions, with no mention anywhere in it of pre-emergent, soil temperature, application rates, or any herbicide by name. On three of those pages, all of them about chemistry and timing, it was listed as though it backed claims it could not possibly back.
- What the label says
- It has been removed from the three control-and-timing pages — crabgrass, spring weed control and the Bermuda herbicide guide — each of which already cites Texas A&M's separate Homeowner's Guide to Herbicide Selection, which is the publication actually doing that work. On the three identification pages it stays, because a photo gallery is the right source for identification, and it is now cited in the body doing that job rather than sitting unused in a list.
- How we found it
- Flagged repeatedly by the audit agents, then confirmed by reading the page and counting: zero occurrences of "pre-emergent", "soil temperature", "2,4-D", "glyphosate", "quinclorac" or "apply". This is the second citation this week that turned out to be doing nothing — the first was a Penn State seasonal page listed on a watering guide that contains no watering guidance. Both were real, reputable publications, which is exactly why neither looked wrong in a list.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /lawn-weed-identification
We got it wrong
- What we had
- We gave the spraying temperature as 60 to 85°F. Neither of the two sources on the page says 60 — Maryland says 65 to 85, Colorado State says 50 to 85. We had quietly averaged two sources that disagree and published a number belonging to neither. Separately, we twice told readers that an autumn-treated taproot does not return in spring, which is a promise no source makes.
- What the label says
- Both ranges are given with their names attached, along with the fact that they agree on the ceiling and not on the floor, and 85°F is presented as the shared limit — Maryland because above it the herbicide is more likely to volatilize and damage sensitive plants, Colorado because above 90°F volatilization injury to other plants in the landscape becomes likely. On timing, autumn is still the best window and now carries Colorado State's reason for it: as winter approaches, perennial broadleaf weeds are storing energy reserves in stems and roots, and a fall-applied herbicide will enter the plant and travel to these plant parts with the food reserves, in an early September to early November window. What it no longer promises is that one pass finishes a mature taproot.
- How we found it
- The ten-agent audit, verified against both sources directly. The averaged temperature is the error worth remembering: nobody invented it out of nothing, it came from splitting a real disagreement between two real sources — which is how a fabricated number can feel like diligence. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is the finding, and the reader should get it rather than the midpoint.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /how-to-kill-dandelions-without-killing-grass
We could not back it up
- What we had
- The diagnostic this whole page turns on — nitrogen yellows the oldest blades, iron chlorosis the newest, and nitrogen makes chlorosis worse — appeared in five places and rested on none of the page's four sources. It was also asserted rather than explained, so a reader had no way to tell whether it was a rule or a rule of thumb.
- What the label says
- UF/IFAS's Iron for Florida Turfgrasses is now a source and carries it, with the mechanism rather than just the symptom: iron is immobile in the plant, does not move from one plant tissue to another, and thus deficiency appears on younger leaves first. A nutrient the plant can move gets stripped out of old growth to feed new growth; one it cannot move shows up where the new growth is. The nitrogen warning is now stronger and sourced — UF/IFAS record that iron deficiency is commonly observed in the spring following N fertilizer applications, so nitrogen is a documented trigger rather than merely the wrong bag, and equally the application of Fe will not cure nitrogen deficiency. NC State's dogs-and-turfgrass publication has been added for the lactic-acid claim it was already carrying unattributed.
- How we found it
- The ten-agent audit flagged the claim as unsupported, which was true of this page's sources and not true of the literature — the supporting publication existed, we had simply never cited it. Filed as sourcing rather than an error because nothing here was wrong. It is the same lesson as the rest of this batch: a correct sentence with no route back to a source is a sentence nobody can check, including us.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /why-is-my-lawn-yellow
We got it wrong
- What we had
- This page put words in NDSU's mouth. A FAQ stated that elsewhere in the same guide NDSU adds a condition, to wait 7 days or until the grasses are actively growing again — NDSU says no such thing. Searching the publication for "actively growing", "growing actively", "until the grass", "resume growth" and "7 days or" returns nothing, across two separate text extractions. The advice itself is reasonable; the attribution was invented, and that is worse than a wrong number. Two related problems sat alongside it: a table row and a summary line carried the same fabricated condition, and a FAQ claimed one label in our catalogue forbids antagonistic tank mixtures when no such wording exists anywhere in our product data.
- What the label says
- What NDSU actually publishes stays quoted verbatim and is the whole of what we attribute to them: reduced grass control can be avoided by applying the grass herbicide at least 1 day before or 7 days after application of a broadleaf herbicide. Everything past that — watching whether the grass has recovered rather than only counting to seven — is now marked as our own inference in our own voice, in all three places it appeared. The label clause is described as a shape to look for on your own bottle, with the admission that we could not say which of ours carries it. The higher-rate lever is marked as crop-specific, because NDSU writes it inside a paragraph about one crop and product pairing.
- How we found it
- The audit flagged all three, and two further findings on this page that turned out to be wrong — an agent reported the 1-day/7-day quote and the higher-rate line as unsupported, when both are verbatim in NDSU. The PDF is two-column, and a layout-preserving text extraction splits its sentences across columns so a search misses them. Worth recording: an automated finding that a claim is unsourced is a place to go and look, not a verdict.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /can-you-mix-herbicides-in-one-tank
We got it wrong
- What we had
- We answered "Will Weed B Gon kill Bermuda grass?" with a flat no, saying Ortho Weed B Gon is labeled safe on established Bermuda. That treats a brand name as if it were a formulation, and on this particular brand it is not. A reader in the South who bought the wrong bottle on our say-so would have damaged the lawn they came here to protect.
- What the label says
- Texas A&M's tolerance table settles it by active ingredient. 2,4-D, dicamba and quinclorac — the ordinary Weed B Gon and the plus-crabgrass version — are rated T, tolerant, on Bermudagrass. But atrazine is rated NR on Bermudagrass, meaning not recommended for that particular species of turfgrass because the turfgrass species is not included on the label as a tolerant species — and Texas A&M lists atrazine as often found in products catered to St. Augustinegrass and/or Centipedegrass lawns, naming Weed B Gon among them. The page now says which formulations are safe and which is not, in the FAQ and again above the product picks.
- How we found it
- An agent flagged the claim against the Texas A&M guide during the audit; the tolerance table was then read directly from the PDF, including the column headers, because the finding turned entirely on which grass the NR belonged to. Worth stating the general lesson: brand names are not safety information, and any sentence of ours that reassures by brand rather than by active ingredient is a sentence to distrust.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /best-weed-killer-for-bermuda-grass
We could not back it up
- What we had
- Two of this page's three headline steps — measuring the lawn and calibrating the spreader — rested on nothing. None of its four sources covered either subject, so a reader had no way to check the part of the page that does the actual work. A product recommendation also asserted that a spreader deflector legally shortens the setback from water in NY, NJ and Michigan, with no route to the rule.
- What the label says
- Penn State's Calibrating Your Fertilizer Spreader is now a source and carries that section: even experienced applicators occasionally make skips and overlaps, which result in alternating light and dark green stripes in the turf, inconsistent pest control, or foliar burn; spreaders should be calibrated separately for each operator; and the two-direction remedy is theirs, including the condition we had left implicit — calibrate to deliver half the desired rate, then cover the entire area twice. The setback claim was correct and is now shown: New Jersey 25 feet to 10, New York 20 feet to 3, Michigan 15 feet waived, each linked to the state restrictions tool.
- How we found it
- The ten-agent audit. This one is filed as sourcing rather than a factual error because nothing on the page turned out to be wrong — but an unverifiable page and a wrong one fail a reader the same way, and the setback claim in particular was a legal assertion with no route to the statute. The title has also been made explicit that the number that is not yours is the coverage figure, not the label rate, which EPA says to follow.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /how-much-fertilizer-do-i-need
We got it wrong
- What we had
- Two claims on a page whose whole job is telling diseases apart. We wrote that no fungal disease produces the dark green halo around a dog spot — one does. And we gave rust as a late-summer and autumn disease as though that were a fact rather than a regional pattern.
- What the label says
- UGA describes fairy ring as a zone of dead grass inside a ring of dark-green grass or a band of dark-green grass, often with a ring of mushrooms. The page now separates the two on the features that actually differ: a dog spot is a few inches across and sits alone, a fairy ring is a large arc that grows outward each season and may fruit mushrooms. On rust, UGA's Georgia bulletin puts it in early spring through mid-summer, depending on the location of the turf, against the late-summer reputation it has in northern cool-season lawns — so the page now leads with UGA's temperature band, 65 to 85°F, and treats the months as regional.
- How we found it
- The ten-agent audit, verified against UGA B1233 directly. The rust entry is the more interesting of the two: our claim was not baseless, it is what cool-season growers see — but we printed it as universal on a page that cites a Georgia bulletin saying otherwise, and never told the reader which of the two they were.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /lawn-fungus-identification
We got it wrong
- What we had
- On the cool-season state pages we told readers a dormant lawn needs about half an inch of water every two or three weeks. That is roughly double what our own cited source says, on a page whose entire argument is that people overwater. We also cited a Penn State page that contains no irrigation guidance of any kind.
- What the label says
- NC State: in the absence of rain, water dormant lawns with a minimal amount (about 0.25 inch) every three weeks to keep the growing points hydrated — and most turfgrasses can withstand 3 to 6 weeks or longer without rain or irrigation with minimal or no damage, which is the reassuring half we had left out. The new-seed guidance now quotes NC State directly too: keep the top 1.5 inches of the soil moist, light watering two or three times a day for 7 to 21 days. The Penn State citation has been removed rather than left as padding.
- How we found it
- The ten-agent audit, re-verified by hand against NC State's Carolina Lawns. The Penn State find came from an agent actually reading a source we had listed for two weeks: it covers seeding, fertilization, mowing and disease, and mentions water twice in passing. A source that does not support the page is not a weaker citation — it is a citation that was never doing anything.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /how-often-to-water-lawn
We got it wrong
- What we had
- The page's meta description — the sentence Google shows — said one pre-emergent pass prevents the whole season, and that once crabgrass is up your options shrink to one chemistry. Both halves were wrong, and the second contradicted this page's own FAQ, which already described dithiopyr's post-emergence window. The body also timed the application to soil holding around 55°F, and a soil-thermometer recommendation was built on telling 55°F from 60°F.
- What the label says
- UF/IFAS: preemergence herbicides are generally effective in controlling weeds from 6–12 weeks following application, and to obtain season-long control, an additional application should follow 6–9 weeks after the initial one. The page now budgets two passes. On timing, Texas A&M puts pre-emergence applications at soil between 50 and 55 °F — the range in which crabgrass begins to germinate — so 50°F is now the cue and 55°F is named as the end of the window rather than the start. On post-emergence chemistry, UGA states that Dimension will also provide postemergence control of crabgrass when treated prior to the tillering stage, which is now cited alongside the product's own front panel.
- How we found it
- The same ten-agent audit, then re-reading UF/IFAS EP141 and UGA B978 directly before changing anything. The 55°F figure is the more instructive error: it was not a typo but a number repeated across pages until a product recommendation was resting on it, and it pushed readers toward being late — the exact failure these pages exist to prevent.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /how-to-get-rid-of-crabgrass
We got it wrong
- What we had
- We told readers crabgrass germinates at 55–60°F and to lay pre-emergent when soil reached 55°F. That is late, and this page's own argument is that a pre-emergent applied late does nothing at all — so the number we published caused the failure the article exists to prevent. We also gave pre-emergent residual as 8–16 weeks.
- What the label says
- Texas A&M's herbicide-selection guide puts it lower: in the spring, preemergence herbicides are often applied when soil temperatures are between 50 and 55 °F, and that is the soil temperature range in which several summer annual weeds — including crabgrass — begin to germinate. 55°F is the top of the window, not the trigger. Residual is now UF/IFAS's figure, 6 to 12 weeks, with their note that season-long control needs a second application 6 to 9 weeks after the first. Goosegrass is added as the exception that runs 3 to 4 weeks later.
- How we found it
- A ten-agent audit of the ten articles our new attribution-density check flagged, each agent reading an article against the sources it actually cites. Both figures were then re-verified by hand against the primary documents before anything was changed.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /spring-weed-control
We got it wrong
- What we had
- Across four pages — the weed-identification pillar, the Bermuda herbicide guide, the spring weed plan and the nutsedge guide — we said nutsedge answers to halosulfuron and sulfentrazone and to nothing else. The absolute was ours, not our sources'.
- What the label says
- UF/IFAS's Florida lawn weed guide states that selective control of various sedges is available with herbicides such as imazaquin (Image Kills Nutsedge), penoxsulam, or sulfentrazone — two chemistries we had ruled out, both sold to homeowners. UC IPM adds trifloxysulfuron, mesotrione and sulfosulfuron on the professional side. Halosulfuron and sulfentrazone remain what we recommend and what you will most easily find; they are no longer described as the only things that work.
- How we found it
- The same audit. Worth naming the failure mode: the claim was true enough to go unchallenged for weeks, and wrong in the one word that mattered. Ruling options out is a stronger claim than recommending one, and it needs the stronger evidence — which we did not have.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /lawn-weed-identification
We got it wrong
- What we had
- This page was titled "Pulling Makes It Worse", and the FAQ said pulling nutsedge multiplies the tubers. That was wrong, and it was wrong in the headline, which is the part most readers take away. It also told people that repeated hand removal — the one control method that costs nothing — was counterproductive.
- What the label says
- UC IPM publishes the opposite: continually removing shoots eventually depletes the energy reserves in the tuber, because the nutsedge will have to use 60% of its reserves to develop the first plant and 20% for the second. One pull achieves nothing, which is what we should have said. Repeated pulling on their schedule — before the plant has 5 to 6 leaves, about every 2 to 3 weeks in summer — is a legitimate non-chemical strategy, and the page now carries it as its own section. What genuinely makes nutsedge worse is tilling, which distributes tubers through the top 6 inches of soil where they survive 1 to 3 years. The title is now "One Pull Does Nothing".
- How we found it
- Re-reading the page against a source we had not used when it was written. Two other numbers went with it: an unsourced claim of "dozens of tubers" per plant, and a treatment threshold of "6 to 8 inches of growth" attributed vaguely to extension guidance. UC IPM's actual deadline is the fifth-leaf stage, after which translocation to the tubers reverses — which is a different instruction, not a more precise version of the same one.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /how-to-get-rid-of-nutsedge
We got it wrong
- What we had
- We passed on Penn State's resistance advice for dollar spot — alternate modes of action, mix contact and penetrant products, or use only contact fungicides — without saying that the contact half of it is unavailable to a homeowner.
- What the label says
- The standard turf contact fungicide is chlorothalonil, and its label prohibits the use our readers would make of it. Quali-Pro Chlorothalonil 720 SFT, EPA Reg. No. 53883-310: 'Do not use on home lawns and turf sites associated with apartment buildings, daycare centers, playgrounds...' Its permitted sites are sod farms, golf courses, professional and collegiate athletic fields, and lawns around commercial and industrial buildings. The article now names that gap and gives the homeowner version — alternate between penetrant classes and lean harder on the cultural fix.
- How we found it
- Reading the label while evaluating whether to add a chlorothalonil product to the catalogue. The advice was never wrong; it was written for superintendents and we handed it to homeowners unchanged. That is a category of error worth naming: sound turf science does not automatically transfer to a residential label.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /dollar-spot
We got it wrong
Liquid Harvest 24.5% Glufosinate Herbicide, 32 oz
- What we had
- We had this recorded as a product whose label could not be found, so nothing on the page could tell a Long Island reader it was prohibited where they live, or that its only labelled turf use is dormant bermudagrass.
- What the label says
- EPA Reg. No. 42750-365-72838. The label says: In the State of New York Only: Not For Use in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Its only turf site is well-established ornamental dormant hybrid or common bermudagrass applied before spring green-up — not the general-purpose non-selective its shelf position suggests. Both facts are now on the product and in the state restrictions tool.
- How we found it
- Finding that the manufacturer publishes its own labels, after the same discovery resolved a different Liquid Harvest product the day before. The dead end was ours, not the label's — we had searched EPA's database and the retailer listing and stopped there.
We got it wrong
Generic (distributor pack) Glyphosate 4 Extra, 2.5 Gallons
- What we had
- We attributed this product to Tide. Nothing on the page said where that came from, because it came from a retail listing rather than from a registration.
- What the label says
- EPA PPLS lists "Glyphosate 4 Extra" under 103810-1-37686 — a distributor pack under distributor number 37686, not a Tide registration. Tide's own glyphosate is a different product entirely (84229-37, Tide Glyphosate 41% Plus). The brand on this record now reads as a generic distributor pack, and the 41% figure is marked as coming from the listing rather than a label, because EPA hosts no label for this registration.
- How we found it
- Being handed three candidate registrations for the name and checking each against EPA's registry instead of picking the most likely one. Two of the three — Alligare's 81927-9 and Albaugh's 42750-61 — are different products with similar names. Guessing between them is exactly how the wrong registration number gets published.
We got it wrong
Whitetail Institute Arrest Max Selective Grass Herbicide, 1 Pint
- What we had
- This was recorded as a product whose label we could not find, so nothing warned a reader in Solano County, California or Hays County, Texas that its use is prohibited where they live.
- What the label says
- EPA Reg. No. 228-729-81883, clethodim 12.6%. The label carries endangered-species prohibitions rather than ordinary state rules: use is banned in a mapped area of Solano County, California to protect Solano Grass, and in Hays County, Texas to protect Wild Rice. Neither is a statewide ban, and both are now in the state restrictions tool with their real scope.
- How we found it
- Reading the manufacturer's own published booklet. These are the first endangered-species restrictions in our data, and they are a kind we were not looking for — we had been checking labels for state-level clauses, not for county-level habitat maps.
We got it wrong
Scotts Turf Builder SummerGuard Lawn Food with Insect Control
- What we had
- We listed white grubs among this product's targets, and one guide told readers it was the right choice once they had counted grubs.
- What the label says
- White grubs are not on the label's pest list. The one grub it does name is black turfgrass ataenius, a much smaller surface-feeding scarab. And the label does not merely omit the rest — three separate times it directs the buyer elsewhere: 'for grub control, use Scotts GrubEx', and 'For grub control, apply Scotts GrubEx anytime from late-April to mid-August.'
- How we found it
- Searching EPA's label database by company number, which turned up a three-part registration: the bag is base registration 101563-254, registered as TALSTAR 0.086 LAWN GRANULAR INSECTICIDE WITH FERTILIZER, distributed by Scotts. Reading that base label produced both the pest list and the registrant's own instruction to buy something else for grubs — so our claim contradicted the label rather than merely overstating it.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /why-is-my-lawn-yellow
We got it wrong
Scotts Turf Builder Bonus S Southern Weed & Feed₂ (29-0-10)
- What we had
- We told readers to keep this bag off bermudagrass. Our Georgia note said bermuda lawns would be injured by it, our Texas note said keep it off bermuda, and our weed-and-feed guide repeated it in three places — including in the logic that decides which bag a state's lawns need.
- What the label says
- Bermudagrass is a labelled use. The permitted grass list reads 'Bermudagrass, St. Augustinegrass, including Floratam, centipedegrass, zoysiagrass, and carpetgrass lawns ONLY'. What the label does prohibit is bahiagrass, bluegrass, fine fescue, bentgrass, ryegrass, tall fescue and dichondra. One real exception explains where our error came from: this is a master label, and a note on it removes bermudagrass from the grass list on bags printed for Florida.
- How we found it
- Reading the accepted label on EPA's label database. This is the first correction here that ran in the reader's favour rather than against it — we had been steering people away from a product they could legally use, and the fix widens the advice rather than narrowing it. It is also the reason our product pages now tell you which grasses a label permits rather than only which it forbids.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /when-to-weed-and-feed-lawn
A search result was wrong
Liquid Harvest Lawn Weed Killer Three-Way Concentrate, 32 oz
- What we had
- A web search reported this product's EPA registration as 68980-02163. It is not a registration number at all — those digits are the middle of the UPC barcode printed on the bottle, 7 68980 02163 6.
- What the label says
- The label says EPA Reg. No. 89442-22-72838. Three parts, so it is a distributor version of 89442-22, which is what this record had already predicted from the active-ingredient percentages before the label was found.
- How we found it
- Reading the label PDF Sanco Industries publishes for the product. The number a search returns is worth nothing until it is seen printed — a barcode fragment and a registration number look alike enough to publish by accident, and publishing a fabricated registration number would be worse than admitting we could not find one.
We got it wrong
Liquid Harvest Lawn Weed Killer Three-Way Concentrate, 32 oz
- What we had
- Our record listed this three-way's targets and rates with no mention of grass tolerance, so nothing on the page told a Florida or South Carolina reader it was unsuitable for their lawn.
- What the label says
- The label permits St. Augustine and centipedegrass only while fully dormant, and only in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Those two grasses are the dominant lawn grass in Florida and South Carolina respectively, so the product is off-label for most lawns in both states. The restriction is now recorded on the product and stated per state in our weed-killer guide.
- How we found it
- Reading the label after this page was the only product in the catalogue with no article linking to it. The orphan was the symptom; an unread label was the cause.
Retail listing contradicted the label
Hi-Yield Turf & Ornamental Weed & Grass Stopper with Dimension, 9.6 lb
- What we had
- The retail listing describes this as oryzalin pre-emergent granules.
- What the label says
- The label says dithiopyr 0.125%, and its own title names Dimension — the dithiopyr brand. This is not a pedantic difference: oryzalin has no post-emergence activity, while this product's front panel claims control up to four weeks after crabgrass emerges. A shopper trusting the listing would buy it expecting a rescue window it would not have.
- How we found it
- Reading the label on the registrant's site. The product was nearly rejected from our catalogue over the contradiction before the label settled it.
Retail listing contradicted the label
Hi-Yield Grass Killer Postemergence Grass Herbicide, 8 oz
- What we had
- The retail listing states the active ingredient is fluazifop-P-butyl.
- What the label says
- The label says sethoxydim. Both are grass-selective herbicides, so the listing is plausible enough to pass unchallenged — and they carry different labelled sites and different tolerances, so the substitution matters.
- How we found it
- Reading the label rather than the listing.
Retail listing contradicted the label
Atticus Torocity Mesotrione Herbicide, 8 oz
- What we had
- Retail copy and one manufacturer sell sheet describe this as 60% mesotrione at 4 lb per gallon.
- What the label says
- The label's active ingredient statement reads 40.0%, and that is what we record.
- How we found it
- Reading the label. When a sell sheet and a label disagree the label is the legal document, and a 50% overstatement of concentration is a dosing error waiting to happen.
We got it wrong
Hi-Yield Triclopyr Ester, 16 oz
- What we had
- We described this as a non-crop brush herbicide for brambles, multiflora rose, honeysuckle and cut stumps, and said it was not a lawn product. Every part of that came from the retail listing title.
- What the label says
- The label's single site is perennial bluegrass, perennial ryegrass and tall fescue ornamental turf. Its Table 2 is a lawn weed table containing ground ivy and wild violet. There is no brush section at all and poison ivy is absent.
- How we found it
- Reading the label on the registrant's own PDF. The same wrong claim had been repeated in our brush and woody-plant guide and was corrected in the same pass. We had also declined this product for a creeping charlie recommendation on the strength of the wrong description — it was the right product for that job all along.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /brush-and-woody-plant-control
We got it wrong
Scotts DiseaseEx Lawn Fungicide
- What we had
- Our record listed dollar spot among this product's targets.
- What the label says
- The word 'dollar' does not appear anywhere on the label. Nineteen diseases are named and that is not one of them — and Virginia Tech's turfgrass pathologist independently states that azoxystrobin essentially has no activity against dollar spot.
- How we found it
- Reading the accepted label on EPA's own label database. The omission turned out to describe the biology rather than the paperwork, which is now the subject of its own guide.
We got it wrong
Bonide Captain Jack's Lawnweed Brew Concentrate
- What we had
- Our California page recommended this product for moss. A reader in California could have bought it for a use the label excludes there.
- What the label says
- The moss, algae and lichen use carries an asterisk reading 'Not for use in California'. The rest of the label is unaffected, so in California this is a broadleaf spot treatment only.
- How we found it
- Reading the printed label and noticing the asterisk on that one use.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /organic-weed-killer-for-lawns
We got it wrong
Prime Source Celsius WG Easy Mix Packet
- What we had
- We called this 'the exception for hot weather', implying no high-temperature limit at all.
- What the label says
- The label carries no blanket high-temperature prohibition of the kind 2,4-D turf labels carry, which is true — but it is not unrestricted. It bars a spray adjuvant above 90°F, and warns that spot treatments to St. Augustinegrass above 90°F may cause temporary growth regulation.
- How we found it
- Re-reading the temperature section specifically because our own wording had started to sound too convenient.
Guide corrected in the same pass: /best-weed-killer-for-bermuda-grass
A search result was wrong
Airmax Shoreline Defense Emergent Weed Control, 1 Quart
- What we had
- A web search reported this product's registration as 42750-59-83742 — which would make it a distributor label of a different glyphosate concentrate we also review.
- What the label says
- The printed label says 81927-8-83742. A different base registrant entirely.
- How we found it
- Reading the printed label on the distributor's own site. This was the third time in one day that opening a label corrected a registration number a search summary had asserted confidently, which is why every product here records where its number came from.
Common questions
- Why publish your own mistakes?
- Because the alternative is asking you to take our accuracy on trust. This site's claim is that its product facts come from EPA-registered labels rather than from retail listings, and that claim is only checkable if the failures are visible alongside the successes. 21 of the entries below are our own errors. Every one of them was found by reading a label we had not read carefully enough the first time.
- How do you find these?
- By opening the label. We have now read 65 product labels on EPA's Pesticide Product Label System or on the registrant's own site, and each product page records which and links to it. Most of the corrections here were found during that pass — reading a label is the single most reliable way to discover that something you published came from a listing instead.
- Do you ever remove entries?
- No. A corrections page that gets pruned is an advertisement rather than a record. Entries stay whether or not the product is still in the catalogue.
- I think something on the site is wrong. What do you do about it?
- Tell us and we will check it against the label rather than against our own copy. If you are right it gets corrected and it gets an entry on this page with your correction dated. The label on the container you are holding outranks anything we have written.
Found something wrong? lawnhealthai@gmail.com. We will check it against the label, not against our own copy — and if you are right, it gets an entry here.