With this Instructable we will learn how to make a safer and cheaper alternative to commercial herbicide. The ingredients are very easy to obtain at any supermarket or grocery store. Most of us have them already available at home.
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Signing UpStep 1: Ingredients
You will need:
- 1 gallon (3.78 liters) of white vinegar
- 12 ounces (341.1 grams) approximately of salt for every gallon of vinegar
- 1 tablespoon, more or less, of dishwashing detergent (biodegradable detergent preferably) will work as a surfactant
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Dear Sir.
Saline, or saline soils are those soils that contain a variety of easily soluble salts in an amount clearly harmful to the normal development of the crops. Almost to salt marshes include soils with soluble salt content of more than 1%. Your composition biodegradable herbicide could never bring so much salt in the soil. Consequently, for the cultural soil it is harmless.
Like most of the projects posted on this site your results will vary.
I am not in favor of polluting ground water. Using Roundup & similar commercial products are of real concern. Those products contain dozens of long acting chemicals that should not be in the hands of the general public. Salt is a pretty basic chemical that should not cause birth defects or rearrange your genes in surprising or unpleasant ways. Of course, anything can be toxic in large enough quantities. Even H20 will kill many living things if used improperly.
If you don't like the idea of putting a few spoonfuls of salt on your weeds then don't do it. I am not always right. I am open to learning new things but I don't think small amount of salt will do any great or long lasting damage, esp when compared to all the other garbage flowing into the ground, streams, & oceans.
There are so many great alternatives to using Roundup which is deadly to frogs and toads and I am sure has effects on us we do not yet know.
Several of my favs are a tea kettle of boiling water poured on the cracks in the sidewalk to cook out the unwanted plants. Remember new seeds germinate all the time so a regular regimen is best.
Think about smothering the unwanted, mulches work, wet newspaper works, tarps work , it just depends on the size of the area you are trying to eliminate unwanted plants from. A black tarp in the sun covering your paver patio for the morning while you run errands will do the job and is a heck of alot cheaper and safe for the kids and critters.
Also do not let weeds go to seed. Pull them, cut them, douse with boiling water. Eventually you will see less and less intruders.
Another fav method to rid the unwanted is with a propane flame weeder (not recommended in dry fire prone areas). There's something quite satisfying with selectively frying a persistent deeply rooted weed!
When i moved to where I am now, I mixed this stuff up and applied it. The weeds came back within a month. So I am guessing the makeup of the soil in this area (a lot more limestone) is such that the plants growing are more resistant to the vinegar/salt combination.
In fact I have noticed that commercial products have more trouble down here as well :( I applied some "Ortho" weedkiller a month ago and need to do it again!
As to the danger of salt being in the environment - whoever puts stock in this theory has never been in places with winters like NW PA. Salt is constantly put on the roads (and has been for a very, very long time) for up to 5-6 months per year to combat ice and snow conditions. There is no problem with it in the water table after countless tons have been put into the environment over the years. And I also noticed I never had to worry or fuss about a garden in NW PA like I do here. Up there, things just grew. Where I am now, this kind of soil makes gardening an art form to become successful at it.
P.S. Welcome to Eastern PA!
Thanks for the welcome - this is a pretty area, and the people sure are nice. I just have a lot to learn about growing a garden down here! I have a 4-square system set up and my plants grow but produce no fruit! And even this year, the tomato plants seem to have stalled in their height and no sign of blossoms so far?!
BTW - actually I'm in Chambersburg but did not figure too many people would know where that was.
This is no alternative to herbicide! It will only pollute the groundwater with a big amount of salt! And this is not bio-degradable. It will stay there or end up in a river!
I can speak for Germany, where using kitchen-salt this way is forbidden!
Nearly nobody knows its forbidden and people try to tell you it is natural and safe, but it is NOT! It harms our water and the fishes in the rivers!
So please don't do this at home or anywhere else!
I've tried this herbicide successfully ( used 1 l. vinager, 1 coffeecup (0,3 l) of salt and one coffeecup of dishwashing detergent). Get's well on cracks or fissures on sidewalk and so on, yet on garden use not so good. because you'll need amounts that will harm your plants. There are herbs who resist.
by the way, nice instructable blackhawk.
Yes it is!
relax, everything's going to be alright. Pro-Tip; don't drink so much Red Bull and post.
Problem with using it on a driveway is that it doesn't stay there, it washes down into the ground to our drinking water...it may take 100 years to get there but think what 100 years worth of salt will do once it gets there, and it will take about as long for it to all work through the system.
The only totally environmentally friendly weed control is actually manually pulling and digging them out. Bonus exercises/yoga/whatever. People are so freaking lazy nowadays.
Nothing else to do I suppose - Any new viewpoints? (glances over comments) nope - same old same old-
Move on - you guys need a job - go volunteer somewhere - Make it a better world - stop squabbling over a tablespoon of salt. Move out of your parents basement.
"This is why you can't have nice things"
M.
Like it was commented, the small amount of salt that you will use in this project will not affect the environment. You will only apply this concoction on pavement cracks. Constant freezing, thawing and rain will dilute the salt. And this herbicide is not intended to be used constantly, depending where you live you may not have to use it more than once each season. I hope that this will help with your concerns.
Great instructable and I will surely try it. (We get free salt in the winter so I don't even have to buy salt!)
A truly civil society and its members should look sensibly at what they do and not repeat mantras of FUDs without thinking.
The poster is saying 12 ounces of salt for 1 gallon of liquid. That's 12 OUNCES.
Think what a 5lb bag of sugar looks like. That's 80 ounces. Now mix that with 6.6 GALLONS of vinegar. That's a lot, right? Would you be using this all at once? In one spot? Or even for your ENTIRE YARD? Unless your yard is several acres, I highly doubt it. Can you imagine using that much Round-Up on your yard?
Once again, that is with a SINGLE 5lb bag.
Your neighbor's dog likely pisses more weed-killing salt on your lawn every single day. Over the course of a decade, do you really believe that that salt will overpower the thousands of tons of dirt between your lawn and the water table? Not. Bloody. Likely. Otherwise, there would be nothing but barren wasteland for miles and miles from the beach's edge.
Please, people, think.
didn't want to sound rude. And indeed you are right. 12 ounces per gallon is not much. But it won't help, it is just as if you didn't use it. Look at the post of chabias.
Why I reacted this way was:
I did several studies about groundwater and know the problem with salt in groundwater. Not always anthropogenic, but very often.
And on the other hand: I have a small garden by my own, and I saw a lot of neighbours pave their walk-way with salt each summer to eliminate the weed. It did work for up to three month maximum! And they used a real lot of salt, like 500g per square-meter or so.
Don't know with how much they started out, but if a little bit doesn't help, let's try more and more and more and more...
boiling water, vinegar, flame thrower, a knife and sweat, that all is o.k. and works for some time, but please omit the salt !!!
Thanks!
Andreas
Your anecdote is much more informative this time around and helps a great deal to explain why such laws may be in place: because there are plenty of fools out there who tend to overdo things exactly as you said.
Salt apparently restricts water uptake by plants, so perhaps the addition of vinegar at the same time (as opposed to separately) really does help.
What would be nice is pictures showing results, not just talk (one way or the other).
Cheers,
We also, dump herbicides into lakes to kill plants that are overgrown from fertilizer sprayed on lawns.
You can't eat the fish anyway because of the heavy metals.
I am in the NorthEast (in the USA). There are more and less polluted areas, it varies by state.
We also use remote control planes to blow people up in other countries -- but that is off topic.
This allows for these elements to rearrange with other elements or molecules in the environment.
Thank you for this diy, its simple and easy !
Plants require relatively high chlorine concentration in their tissues. Chlorine is very abundant in soils, and reaches high concentrations in saline areas, but it can be deficient in highly leached inland areas. The most common symptoms of chlorine deficiency are chlorosis and wilting of the young leaves.
And from the University of Kansas:
[C]hloride-containing fertilizers include: ammonium chloride (NH4 Cl), calcium chloride (CaCl2), magnesium chloride (MgCl2), and sodium chloride (NaCl). These fertilizers contain 66 percent, 65 percent,
74 percent, and 60 percent chloride, respectively.
Of course I added the emphasis to sodium chloride--you know, "salt." Carefully understood, the issue is not about salt as toxic to plants, but rather how much is beneficial and how much is too much. I am persuaded by the comment from djimdy (above) that the amount of salt added by the spot use of salt in the relatively-low concentrations called for in this Instructable is minuscule, and may in fact be beneficial.
According to the many scientific sources you'll find using Google, light inland soils can be easily leached of chloride enough to need supplementation. Salt is mentioned in numerous sites as a cheap amendment to treat hypo-chlorosis.
By the way, according to an EU report (European Task Force TG3, 'Snow and Ice Control on European Roads and Bridges.'), Germany uses more than 2,000 metric tons of salt each year to de-ice roads--all of which leaches into both ground and surface waters. Is it really illegal there to use it in your yard?
Also, it appears that "salting the earth" by conquering armies in ancient times was for ritual purposes only--sort of like a triumphal march--and that salt was far too valuable to have been used in the quantities needed to poison farm fields.
I teach university students how to use online research to sort fact from fiction in claims made by others. It inoculates them against rumor, bias, and just plain stupidity.
another option is road grit, but it´s a big job (connected with other damages to the environment) to remove it in spring.
but please think of this:
"Many little people doing many little things in many little places can change the face of the world!" African proverb
i decided not to use salt for my own.
The vinegar makes the soil acidic so nothing grows where its at, until its diluted by rain or water hose. It also will kill the grass!! flowers!! etc!!
But be aware that next spring the offending weed will probably back as weed roots all need to be killed, any left and they grow again.
Also many weeds are spread by parts of the leaves such as creeping charlie, so clean your mower deck after mowing each yard to avoid spreading the weeds.
I know my ex used a commercial weed killer in the past. I'm thinking it created a super-weed.
ité very bad for our groundwater to give salt on the ground.
I USE JUST VINEGAR CLEANER (without other additives) on a hot sunny day
or a knife and use the time to get a sunkissed skin ;)
this is not our world, think of your children!
best regards from germany!
THE VINEGAR ALONE WILL WILT AND WITHER THE WEEDS; do it 3 times and likely the roots will quit, too.
But vinegar will not harm the soil and is very effective in killing weeds. It might even benefit for soil that is too alkaline. Vinegar has so many uses.
I would not have thought of using detergent as a surfactant. Good idea.