Sounds like allot of fun just as long as you are wearing flame retardant socks. Fire, a beer, weeds and a setting sun what else could you ask for?

Never use on poison ivy.

It releases CO2, so I don't do it.

Dan

Any combustion process would release numerous pollutants that would include CO2 and CO among others. Flaming will cause the top growth of a plant to die, if done properly, but would need to be repeated fairly often to kill the roots and flaming has the potential, besides polluting your environment, of starting a much larger fire if the soil is not wet down before hand.
Given the time involved in flaming "weeds" spreading newspaper and covering that with a mulch would be a better choice except on a driveway or sidewalk.

Flaming is a very efficient way of dealing with weeds under certain circumstances. It's ideal for treating weeds in driveways, walkways, along fencelines, in graveled areas, etc., but not very good for beds or lawns. And repeated flaming on existing weeds is not required - a couple of passes and a noticeable wilting of the topgrowth is an indication the weed is dead/dying. You do not need to "torch" or crisp the plant to black in order to successfully kill it and it does kill the roots as well. We used a flame weeder at my former nursery, most of which had graveled or paved sales areas and parking lots and it was highly effective.

As to emissions, yes there will be some but no more and likely a bit quite less than using any gas powered garden equipment or even your gas powered BBQ.....let's make sure we are putting things in the proper perspective :-) Weed flaming is an approved organic alternative to herbicides.

Here is a link that might be useful: flame weeding article

My neighbor in Seattle had one and I tried it once on our driveway, sidewalk, and in the rock mulch. It worked well, I got to pretend I was Godzilla, and the crisped lvs were easily swept into the beds.

And there were more carbon and ozone precursor emissions from me doing that than taking 20 more minutes to get some exercise, and that includes the life-cycle costs of the 2 beers consumed during hand weeding. And I did not use the barbecue to do any weeding, just feeding.

Lastly, hand-weeding is far, far less expensive than all that equipment you need to purchase.

;o)

Dan

The groundskeeper at an apartment across the street got a flame weeder from WalMart for use in some xeriscaped areas. It was unsatisfactory. He then went to the hardware store and got equipment that was much more expensive and that worked fine for the xeriscaped areas.

He just told me about it. I don't know why he failed with the first one. Just said it didn't work.

Later a large evergreen near one of the apartments caught fire and the fire department had to be called. We don't know [wink, wink] what started the fire.