Brake cleaner on grass

[Mark_h]

Folks, a while ago it was mentioned that brake cleaner has a less than beneficial impact on your lawn. Unfortunately a can fell over, fell on the button and squirted a fairly big area in brake cleaner. Immediately poured loads of water on it but I now have a big dead area.

Assuming I'm not the first to do this, has anyone ever recovered from this? Does it grow back?
Do I just apply a bit of seed?
Do I need to dig out several feet of soil and replace it with less contaminated stuff?

Guess there are not many .ORG gardeners but one lives in hope ....

[flymo]

http://www.expressgrass.com/

The most foolproof solution is to move house.

[embee]

Brake cleaner is very volatile and should (he said) not stay around long or go into the soil to any extent. It will do nasty things to the green blades of the grass, but grass is unusual stuff in that it grows from the bottom not from the tip like most plants, which is why it survives grazing animals.

I'd say wait a while to see whether it'll recover, chances are it might well do. At this time of year it'll take a few weeks to look anything decent after a serious hit, but give it some time and see.

[DJ123]

i'd have thrown a flame on it to burn it off. That would have been the quickest to get rid of it

Just give it a good soaking and reseed it. It'll be fine

[kaivalagi]

If you're in no rush just let it get rained on lots and re-seed in spring...

[punyXpress]

Just be thankful it was the grass - I did read that right didn't I ?

I did the same thing a few years ago with bike degreaser. Didn't end well, we had a patch on the lawn which was clearly less willing to grow then the rest for many years.

I could be wrong, but the problem with soaking it is that it can be quite harmful even in very small quantities, but adding more water to it you are just transporting it around. You might be lucky, but i think you'll need to reseed it at the very least. Also if you don't reseed it the first thing likely to grow back will probably be hardier stuff, like crab grass and weeds. My mum still isn't very happy at me for that one.

[Sir Trev]

Can't be as bad as the large dead patches on my lawn caused by my dog weeing in the same place every day... Unless you have some magical showpiece of a garden I would not worry much. Try a handful of seed - Sept/Oct are good times for seeding and overseeding. The "patch kits" from garden centres are rather expensive so if you have a Wilkinson near by have a look to see if they're still doing loose seed by the scoop which is way better value.