Compo 26173

A different legal category from everything else on this shelf

Three products here are biocides for stone and roofs. Three are fertilisers with iron.

This is a plant protection product, and the listing carries the statutory wording: use plant protection products carefully; always read the label and product information before use.

That difference is not a formality. It brings restrictions nothing else in this family has:

At most once a year.

May to August only, during the growing season.

Above 10 °C.

Not in the year of sowing.

The lawn may not be used for two to three days afterwards — after watering in and after the surface has dried.

A buyer who treats this as interchangeable with the iron feeds on this shelf has misread the product.

What it does that the others do not

Broadleaved weeds.

The iron feeds on this shelf blacken moss and feed grass. They do nothing at all to dandelion, plantain, clover, daisy or buttercup — and on most neglected lawns those are at least as much of the problem as the moss.

This contains a selective herbicide: something that damages broadleaved plants and leaves grasses alone. That is the entire reason for the extra restrictions, and it is the reason to choose this over a feed.

The protocol, which is unusually complete

The listing publishes the whole sequence, and it is worth following exactly because there is only one application a year to get right.

Mow first, and wait one to two days. Cut foliage does not take up a herbicide well, and weeds need a day or two to recover leaf area before they can absorb anything.

Choose a rain-free day. Rain within a day or two washes the product off the leaf before it has acted, and the application is spent.

Apply in the morning to a dew-wet lawn. Moisture is what dissolves the granules and gets the actives onto the leaf and onto the moss. Moss in particular absorbs dissolved minerals across its entire surface, having no cuticle to speak of.

Let it act for one to two days. No watering during that period.

Water after two to three days. This moves the fertiliser off the leaf and into the soil.

Then remove the dead weeds and moss mechanically.

That last line is the one no other lawn product on this shelf states, and it is the most important. Killing moss does not remove it. A lawn full of dead black moss still has the moss in it, holding water at the surface and breaking down into thatch, and it has to be raked out — this site’s aerator shelf carries the rakes.

Ten degrees, and why it is not negotiable

A selective herbicide works through actively growing tissue. It is taken up by the leaf and moved within the plant, and that movement depends on the plant growing.

Below about 10 °C the target weeds are barely growing. They take up very little, they survive, and the one permitted application for the year has been used.

So the temperature is not a comfort threshold, it is the mechanism. April warmth is not the same as 10 °C of sustained growing weather, and the May-to-August window exists to keep people out of the margins.

Not in the sowing year

Stated, and the reason is straightforward.

A selective herbicide relies on a difference in tolerance between grass and broadleaved plants. Established grass has a deep root system, a developed cuticle and reserves to recover with.

A lawn sown this season has none of those. Seedling grass has a small root system and thin tissue, and a dose an established sward shrugs off can check it severely or kill it.

This site’s lawn seed shelf covers the other half of that sequence: a new lawn needs a full season before it can take this kind of treatment, and weeds in a new lawn are better dealt with by mowing, which most annual weeds do not survive.

“Rapid closure of the bare patches”

The listing’s own phrase, and it identifies the real problem with any combined product.

Killing moss and weeds creates bare ground. Whatever the moss was covering, and wherever a dandelion rosette was sitting, is now open soil — and open soil in a lawn is where the next moss and the next weeds arrive.

So the fertiliser half of this product is not a bonus, it is the necessary other half: the grass has to grow into those gaps before anything else does.

Where a gap is too large for the surrounding grass to close, it needs seed. The rates on this site’s lawn seed shelf run 20 to 30 g/m², and the condition that decides success is that the seed reaches soil — which the raking has just arranged.

The timing conflict is worth noting and the listing does not: a selective herbicide in the soil is not an ideal seedbed, so overseeding is a job for a few weeks later rather than the same afternoon. The label is the authority on how long.

The rate, and the granule

9 kg for 300 m² is 30 g/m², and the two figures agree.

The granule is described as a homogeneous fine granule that dissolves quickly.

Both halves matter here more than on a plain feed. Homogeneous means the fertiliser and the actives are in every granule rather than blended as separate particles — which is what stops the mixture separating in the bag and in the spreader, and it is what makes 30 g/m² deliver the same dose everywhere.

Fine and fast-dissolving matters because a herbicide has to get onto leaf and stay there. A coarse granule sits in the sward and takes days.

At 30 g/m² the spread has to be even. This site’s spreader shelf is blunt about why: a rotary spreader throws a cone denser in the middle than at the edges, so passes must be overlapped correctly or the lawn records the error — pale strips where neither pass reached full rate, and scorched strips where two overlapped. With a herbicide in the granule, a double dose is a more serious matter than with a feed.

The fifth feature line

“Age description: No.”

A database field, published as a product feature.

It is reported here because this is the one product on the shelf carrying legal restrictions on who may use it and when, and a listing that spends a fifth of its description on an empty catalogue attribute is worth describing accurately.

The label on the pack is the authority for this product. Not the listing.

Availability

From 61 € to 78 €, that being the spread across the German and Spanish Amazon stores on the day of the survey.

Nothing came back from the American, British, French and Italian Amazon stores at all; the buy button there runs a search rather than opening an empty page.

Taken from Keepa on the day this page was last revised; stock and prices move without notice.