How to Get Rid of Bindii and Clover in Your Lawn

Key takeaway: Bindii and clover both move in when a lawn is thin, bare or under-fed, and both respond to the same two-part fix: spray before bindii flowers, roughly late autumn through to early spring, with a herbicide matched to your grass type (buffalo needs a bromoxynil or MCPA-based product, never a dicamba one), then thicken up the lawn so the gap they got in through closes over. Always check the label on the bottle in your hand, since rates and grass-type safety change between products and get updated over time.

If you’ve ever copped a bindii prickle in the arch of your foot crossing the lawn barefoot in spring, you already know why this one gets treated as a priority rather than a nuisance. Getting rid of bindii in your lawn, along with the clover and other broadleaf weeds that tend to show up alongside it, comes down to two things: hitting them at the right time of year, before they’ve flowered, and choosing a weed killer that’s actually safe for the grass you’ve got. Get the timing and the product wrong and you can spend a whole season spraying for nothing, or worse, damage the lawn you were trying to protect.

What You’re Actually Looking At

Bindii, also written bindi and known as jo-jo weed or onehunga weed, is the common name for Soliva sessilis, a low, ground-hugging winter annual that forms a fern-like rosette hard against the soil. Brisbane City Council lists it as an exotic weed with no formal declaration anywhere in Australia, so this is purely a comfort and lawn-quality problem, not a biosecurity one. The pain comes from the seed head, a small spined capsule that hardens as the plant matures and turns an infested lawn into something you can’t cross barefoot.

Clover in an Australian lawn is almost always white clover, Trifolium repens, and it’s a completely different kind of plant: a creeping legume with the three-leaflet shape everyone recognises, spreading by stems that root at each node as they go. The Australian Government’s Office of the Gene Technology Regulator notes that white clover fixes its own nitrogen from the air rather than drawing it from the soil, which is exactly why it turns up in the same spots a lawn is running short on fertiliser. It doesn’t need the nitrogen your grass is missing, so it out-competes the grass right where the grass is struggling most.

Clover’s rounder leaflets and pom-pom flower heads are often confused with oxalis, a different, non-legume weed that doesn’t respond to feeding the same way. See our guide to telling oxalis and clover apart if you’re not sure which one you’ve actually got.

Safety First: the Label Is the Law

Every product named in this guide is a registered agricultural chemical, and in Australia the label approved by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) isn’t a suggestion, it’s the actual legal instruction for using that product. Two products with almost identical names can carry different active constituents and different grass-type restrictions, and formulations get reformulated over time, so a blend that wasn’t buffalo-safe a few years back may since have changed, or the reverse. Check the specific label on the bottle in front of you rather than a forum post or a bag of memory, and if the directions don’t name both your product and your grass type together, don’t apply it until you’ve read the label properly. If you share the lawn with a dog, our guide to whether weed and feed is safe for dogs covers the research on re-entry timing.

Which Weed Killer Is Safe for Your Lawn Type?

Not sure which grass you’ve actually got? Sort that out before you buy anything, since the whole table below turns on getting this one detail right.

Active Constituents	Safe On	Not Safe On	Typical Label Rate*
Bromoxynil + MCPA	Buffalo (incl. Sir Walter), couch, kikuyu	Check individual label	30 mL per 5–10 L water per 50 m² (spray application)
MCPA + Clopyralid + Diflufenican	Buffalo (test ST85 and other soft-leaf cultivars on a small patch first), couch, kikuyu, carpet grass, Queensland blue couch	Check individual label	50 mL per 2–5 L water per 100 m²
Dicamba + MCPA	Couch, kikuyu	Buffalo and Durban grass	Varies by brand and concentration, check the current label

*These are the rates printed on specific currently registered labels at the time of writing, given as a real-world example of what a label rate looks like. They are not a universal rate for every product carrying these actives. Weigh or measure your own product against its own label every time.

How to Get Rid of Bindii

Time it right. Treat from late autumn through winter and into early spring, while plants are young and green and before they’ve flowered (flowering generally starts from late winter). Once seed heads have hardened, spraying stops next year’s crop but won’t remove the prickle that’s already there.
Match the product to your grass. Use the table above: a buffalo lawn needs a bromoxynil or MCPA-clopyralid-diflufenican product, never a dicamba blend.
Spray the whole lawn if it’s widespread. Spot-spraying works for a few isolated rosettes, but once bindii has spread past a handful of clumps, a blanket application is more reliable than chasing individual plants.
Leave the mower alone either side of spraying. Check your label, several labelled products call for 3 to 4 days without mowing before and after application, since the herbicide is absorbed through the leaf and mowing removes exactly the surface area it needs.
Hand-pull isolated plants after rain, when the softened soil lets the whole root out, particularly useful in a small lawn or right along a garden bed edge where you’d rather not spray.
Fix the bare patch it grew in. Bindii establishes fastest in thin or bare ground, so a spot that needs respraying two years running usually needs repairing the patch itself, not just another round of herbicide.

How to Get Rid of Clover in Your Lawn

Feed the lawn properly first. Because clover specifically favours low-nitrogen soil, a fertilising program that actually meets your grass type’s needs removes the advantage that let it in, and does more for the long term than any spray on its own.
Spray with a labelled bindii-and-clover product. Most of the bromoxynil, MCPA and clopyralid-diflufenican blends used for bindii are labelled for clover too. Check the label names clover specifically rather than assuming.
Pull small patches by hand, and get the creeping stems as well as the roots. Clover spreads by rooting at each node along the stem, so a patch that looks removed can regrow from a stem fragment left behind.
Mow a little higher, not lower. A denser, taller sward shades the soil surface and makes it harder for clover seedlings to establish in the first place.
Expect more than one treatment. Clover seed persists in the soil for years, so a single spray rarely clears an established patch for good, especially in the first season.

How to Kill Weeds in Your Lawn Without Killing the Grass

Most of the other broadleaf weeds that turn up in an Australian lawn respond to the same actives covered above; dandelion, capeweed, oxalis and creeping thistles are commonly listed alongside bindii and clover on the same product label. The one rule that matters more than any of them is matching the product to your actual grass type and applying it under the right conditions, and our full guide on killing weeds without killing the grass [INTERNAL LINK OPPORTUNITY: link to “How to Kill Weeds in Your Lawn Without Killing the Grass”, draft 1236, not yet published] covers the selective-versus-non-selective mechanics, spot-treatment technique, timing and pre-emergents in full.

Common Mistakes That Bring Weeds Straight Back

Spraying after the plant has already flowered. It kills the plant in front of you but does nothing about the seed it’s already dropped.
Using a dicamba-based product on a buffalo lawn. This is the single most damaging mistake in this niche, and it can cost you the lawn along with the weed.
Mowing too soon before or after spraying, which cuts off the leaf area the herbicide needs to work through.
Treating the weed but ignoring the bare or low-fertility patch that let it establish, so it simply comes back.
Expecting one spray to be permanent. Most broadleaf weed seed banks need more than one season of treatment to clear.

When to Call a Pro

Call a lawn care contractor if broadleaf weeds cover more than roughly a third of the lawn, if two seasons of your own treatment haven’t held, or if you’re not confident identifying your own grass type before choosing a product. A contractor can also access some registered products in commercial formulations and pack sizes that aren’t sold to home gardeners. Weeds are rarely the only thing working against a lawn at the same time, so lawn grubs and other pests are worth ruling out too if patches keep declining despite the weeds being under control.

When to Treat: the Bindii and Clover Season

In temperate Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and Mediterranean Perth, autumn through to early spring is the treatment window in most years, since that’s when bindii is actively growing but hasn’t yet flowered. In subtropical Brisbane and northern New South Wales, that window can open a few weeks earlier, because the first germinating rains after summer tend to arrive sooner. In the tropical north, Darwin and Cairns, dry winters mean bindii pressure is generally lower, and broadleaf weeds are more likely to show up as a wet-season issue instead. Clover isn’t nearly as seasonal, since it’s really a fertility problem more than a calendar one, but it still grows fastest through the cooler, damper months, so the same autumn-to-spring window is the most efficient time to treat it too.

See our full guide to lawn weeds in Australia [INTERNAL LINK OPPORTUNITY: link to “Lawn Weeds in Australia: The Complete Guide”, draft 1343, not yet published] for how this fits with every other weed on an Australian lawn.

Bindii isn’t the only lawn weed with a painful burr. If the prickle feels unusually hard and sharp, or the plant itself looks nothing like bindii’s feathery rosette, see our guide to khaki weed [INTERNAL LINK OPPORTUNITY: link to “Khaki Weed: An Australian Guide”, draft 1369, not yet published], a declared weed in several states with a distinctly different look and a much nastier burr.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the best time to treat bindii in Australia?

Late autumn through winter and into early spring, before the plant has flowered. Once seed heads have formed and hardened, spraying stops next year’s crop but won’t remove the prickle already in the lawn.

Can I use the same weed killer for bindii and clover?

Usually yes. Most bromoxynil or MCPA-based bindii products are labelled for clover as well, but check the label names both weeds before buying, since not every bindii-specific product does.

Is bindii weed killer safe for buffalo grass?

Only if it’s a bromoxynil or MCPA-clopyralid-diflufenican based product. Dicamba-based weed killers are not safe for buffalo or Durban grass and can damage the lawn.

Will my lawn’s clover go away if I just fertilise it?

Fertilising properly removes the low-nitrogen advantage clover relies on and will thin it out over time, but an established patch usually still needs hand-pulling or a targeted spray in the first season as well.

Why does bindii keep coming back in the same spot every year?

Almost always a combination of a bare or thin patch that gives seed somewhere to establish, and a missed pre-flowering treatment window the year before. Fixing the patch matters as much as the spray.

Is bindii a declared or noxious weed in Australia?

No. Bindii isn’t declared or noxious in any Australian state or territory. It’s strictly a lawn comfort and quality problem rather than a biosecurity one.

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