Vinegar/Salt Weed Killer
shadyindylady
18 years ago
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JAYK
17 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
RE: Regular Vinegar as Weed Killer (With Pics)
Comments (2)Vinegar is for top-kill only. Bermudagrass roots *will* survive and grow again!...See Morevinegar as a weed killer
Comments (6)If you search through the old posts, and maybe do a general read-through of the whole forum as you have time, you will see several postings about vinegar, either the household stuff at a strength of 3% or 5% or the horticultural at 20-30%. Be aware that the latter is a STRONG acid, and should be treated with great caution. Vinegar kills only the leaves, not the roots, of plants, especially young plants. If the plant is an older one, or a returning perennial, then the roots won't be killed with one application, and will need repeated applications. Soaking the roots will only - temporarily - make the soil acid. This MIGHT kill off some weeds, but might not kill off others, and won't be good for the surrounding plants you don't want to kill. If you want to spray against slugs and snails on hostas, a weakish solution of cold caffeinated coffee will stop them eating the leaves, but may not kill them. If you want to kill slugs, your best bet is Slug-go or any other iron-phosphate based granule or pellet. It's harmless to pets and birds, and breaks down to a mild fertilizer....See MoreVinegar as a weed-killer
Comments (5)My oldest son actually did a comparison of a few homemade weed killers for a middle school science project a couple of years ago. Straight vinegar was only moderately effective. It did not kill roots, so any weed capable of resprouting from the roots (grasses, dandelions, perennial weeds) came right back. It did kill some of the annual weeds, though. We also tried boiling water, which was more effective. It still didn't kill off grasses or other deep-rooted weeds - at least not with the quantity of boiling water we were able to carry to the yard. Boiling vinegar did better, killing most of the dandelions, but the grasses and some of the perennial weeds still came back. (Note: a big pot of boiling vinegar is no fun to carry across the yard. The things we do for our kids...) My experience has been that to kill grasses or perennial weeds, you really have to pull/dig up the roots completely or use Roundup. Soil solarization works pretty well for annual weeds, but grasses will still come back because solarization only heats the soil to 6"-8", and grass roots can be considerably deeper. You can also cover the ground with a thick layer of cardboard (covered with a thick layer of mulch to keep the cardboard in place) and smother the weeds. This works, but the grasses and weeds will find any spots where you didn't adequately overlap the cardboard....See MoreVinegar as a Weed Killer
Comments (13)Vinegar works just fine to kill weeds - you have to get it to the roots though, leaf application does nothing. I buy it by the 2 gallon jug and use an old dish soap bottle with the top that you pop up to aim it between bricks in a path as organic alternative to roundup. aprilwine - Maybe you are thinking of Ammonia - which is nearly all Nitrogen. Bleach has no nitrogen in it. The chemical forumula is NaClO - Sodium Hypochlorite. That N is Na for sodium. NaCLO is a strong oxidizer and a poison. See Wikipedia for an overview. As a sterilant, it will kill all living things in the soil its applied to, including all bacteria, earthworms, etc. But its really good for cleaning tools or if you have any fungal infections in the garden.. I wipe my clippers with dilute bleach between every cut on broadleaf evergreens. I don't know what the effect is if diluted 1:10 - but if the Chlorine moves off as a gas maybe it disintegrates quickly - don't know. Having poured bleach on red ant hills, I can tell you nothing grows there for years - it completely sterilizes the spot....See Morekevin_bartoy
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