Dian, 20% vinegar, if you could find it, is quite caustic and there is some danger to the applicator involved. As far as I know, boiling vinegar does not increase the acidity - at least the ph doesn't change when using it in pressure canned recipes and canning where acidity can be paramount :) If you use regular 5% vinegar as a weed spray it will kill minor weeds, especially if sprayed on a sunny afternoon (as opposed to a shady morning or evening). It will quickly kill top growth, and may not have a lasting effect on tap rooted weeds like dandelions. Unlike Roundup, it doesn't have a systemic action, meaning it is not taken down into the roots to kill at that level.

Check the threads again!

Ahhh, an eternally ongoing discussion of this hosta problem. Glad to see it's still up-front in the discussions. After last summer's disaster of being called out of town for a sudden and unexpected death in the family, at the worst possible time for slug hunting, early July for us here in zone 4b, and returning to find our 2 acre >1000 hosta garden looking like Swiss cheese, I embarked on an epic research project about how to avoid this from now on. We love to give tours of our garden, so this was a priority. After literally hundreds of hours of reading, I decided to go chemical. Yes, the beer bait traps that I used after returning home last summer were so amazing, but keeping up with them in this size garden were untenable. So now, there are, basically, two choices: Iron Phosphate or Metaldahyde based products. Iron Phosphate claims environmentally friendly. Metaldahyde claims better effectiveness. Pros in commercial crop fields that are also prone to slug damage use, by and large, Metaldahyde based product. This year I used both, with no noticable difference. Certainly, I saw no difference in wildlife population, a major concern to me. In fact, there was a record number of tree frogs here this year, so they must have enough other prey to thrive. Other frogs, turtles, snakes, birds, and so forth, were all normal. Actually, I had a record number of some species of birds, all insect eaters. YAY! Now I'm expanding my research to a second ingredient found in some products. This is about cutworms and the like. OK, slugs cause most all of those roundish holes in your hosta leaves, but what about the long oblong cut paths between the veins? Cutworms, and the like. A few of the products available to do in the slugs include an ingredient to take care of cutworms, et. al. so I'm studying this now. The ingredient used to do that is reportedly hard on honey bees, and that's a concern to me, of course. I don't have enough answers about that quite yet, but what I know now leads me to believe that the active life of the ingredient that drops cutworms is short enough to be safely applied at dusk when the honey bees are gone, and when they arrive the next morning are good to go. Since there were no bee hives close enough to me this year to test this, I remain clueless and hopeful. Bottom line? My wife posts pics of our gardens on another forum during the past few weeks and others on said forum are in amazement that ours are still in show quality. Nuff said? hillbilly, awaiting tonight's predicted frost, wishing it weren't so, but it's overdue, on average . . .

Out of curiosity I decided to look up the MSDS for Finish rinse aid. I thought I remembered it to be pretty benign especially since such little amounts are used in the final rinse water. Just a few cc's in a couple gallons of water that is used to break the surface tension of the water. MSDS Component analysis - Oral LD50 Ingredient(s) Alcohols, C12-15, ethoxylated propoxylated LD50 1200 mg/kg rat Citric acid 5040 mg/kg mouse; 3000 mg/kg rat Sodium cumenesulfonate 7000 mg/kg rat Effects of acute exposure Eye - None expected during normal conditions of use. May cause eye irritation upon direct contact with the eyes. Skin - None expected during normal conditions of use. Not expected to be a skin sensitizer. Inhalation - None expected during normal conditions of use. Ingestion - Health injuries are not known or expected under normal use. Sensitisation - The finished product is not expected to have chronic health effects. Chronic effects - The finished product is not expected to have chronic health effects. Carcinogenicity - The finished product is not expected to have chronic health effects. Mutagenicity-The finished product is not expected to have chronic health effects. Reproductive effects - The finished product is not expected to have chronic health effects. Teratogenicity - The finished product is not expected to have chronic health effects. Synergistic - Materials Not available