It seems like the humid summer, along with our salt air environment, makes weeds grow overnight. And a rainy spring only encourages them to flourish. One such weed is called “Dollarweed” is prevalent here in Eastern NC growing everywhere. It has a shoot system that is difficult to eradicate by hand weeding.
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Unless you live under a rock, by now everyone has heard of the negative consequences of using pesticides such as Roundup for weed control.
Living in an environment as ecologically sensitive as ours, gardeners and homeowners need to be educated about what types of weed control to use around our children, pets and plants.
Some time spent researching the internet indicates one environmentally sound weed control is a combination of salt, vinegar and sometimes a drop or two of dish soap. The vinegar kills the weed and the salt helps prevent a rapid re-growth.
Natural & Homemade Weed-Killing Recipe
One homemade recipe uses:
- Vinegar
- Salt
- Dish soap
1 gallon of vinegar (5% acetic acid) mixed with 1 cup salt and 1 tablespoon dish soap, with an emphasis on the salt making its low concentration effective.
Some garden websites recommend hand painting the dollar weed with the vinegar mix. If your garden looks anything like mine, that will take all day and then some. I have successfully used a sprayer readily available at Amazon. Spray early in the morning with NO wind and spray the weed up close. It will be absorbed into the leaf spreading throughout the plant. It will kill any plant it encounters so spray on the weed and not your surrounding flowers or garden plants.
Wait for a forecast of at least a few continuous days of sunshine before you apply vinegar.
There are two reasons why a sunny period is important:
- You need to saturate the weeds with vinegar for it to be effective, and rain would wash off too much of the vinegar from the foliage.
- The real damage to the weeds begins in the days after the application when the sun hits the leaves.
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