So I’ve got a lot of plants/weeds around my place, and I want to kill most of them… but herbicides are expensive when you start looking at buying gallons of it, and I don’t want my house sitting in the middle of a chemical soup bath either. Fortunately, the answer is simple;
The vinegar kills weeds, the salt stops them from regrowing, and the dish soap holds everything in place until the job’s done. If you want to grow another plant in the spot immediately, hold off on the salt as it can stick around for a while and hinder future growth. Extrapolated WMD style large scale plant death = 10 gallons vinegar to 10 quarts salt and 10 quarts soap.
Of course, higher concentrations of acetic acid in your vinegar are better. Here’s a study that shows the effectiveness of such treatments compared to RoundUp. The one thing the study doesn’t reveal is the cost difference. 1 gallon of “super concentrate” RoundUp costs $110 at my local hardware store and supposedly covers 25,500 square feet, which is barely over 1/2 acre. I was actually able to find a restaurant supply store selling 4 packs of 1 gallon vinegar jugs for only $6.00! That’s 4 gallons of vinegar for $6.00! But even at retail prices, I could find 2 packs of 1 gallon jugs for $20.00. Salt and soap are also very cheap.
My mother has a similar recipie for snails. Every time i visit there is this ominous large bottle filled to the brim with water and dying snails. It seems she strolls around the yard with this 5 liter bottle of salt water happily picking out the snails and droping them into it…
Now while i do find that both amusing and ingenous there is a small part of me that finds something just… wrong… with the entire process. But great recipie Amal, thanks 🙂
Hmm, it sounds like a salt brine is probably one of the ways you’d start curing escargot 😉 I know what you mean though, it does somehow feel wrong to just watch these relatively helpless yet voracious little buggers sit and suffocate.
On the the hand, I have no problem grabbing fleas and putting them into warm soapy water and watching them twitch around (the soap breaks the surface tension so they’ll actually sink). In fact, I wish there was some way to set up some kind of flea-translator so I could tell them how I loathed them as they twitched and died. It’s not enough to just drown them, I kinda want them to know I think they are the scourge of the Earth (them and mosquitoes), and that’s why even a slow torturous death is too good for them (and mosquitoes).
I think it has something to do with sucking my blood… I just have a problem with that, ya know 😉 Interestingly enough, I don’t have that same hatered for leeches… probably because I feel like leeches are kind of like nature’s idiot trap. They don’t come after you and get you in your sleep or anything… you pretty much have to walk right into them.
“In fact, I wish there was some way to set up some kind of flea-translator so I could tell them how I loathed them as they twitched and died.” hahaha, scariest thing i’ve read today.
Christmas saw me and a group of friends go to the middle of nowhere to this huge river and camp for a few days. We wound up spending so much time in the river that my muscles atrophied. On the second day we decided to swim up river and found out firsthand how much leeches suck. (my humour sucks so badly.) They latched on to my arms and legs… small ones but still leeches. Ive never got out of water so fast in my life.