The Easiest Chemical-Free Way To Kill Weeds

We constantly wage war on weeds. Instead of using commercial weed killer to eliminate those pesky weeds, we looked for more eco-friendly and cheap solutions and put them to the test to see which was best. Here are the results.

Photo by Hermann Kaser

In this experiment, I tried three solutions: boiling water, white vinegar, and vinegar with some salt mixed in, and sprayed these to two areas with different kinds of weeds.

This is what the two areas looked like at the start. Lovely, right?

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Boiling Water: The Instant Weed Killer

This is what the first area looked like right after spraying one side with vinegar and pouring boiling water on the other. You can see how fast the boiling water worked. The weeds started to turn brown right away. The vinegar-sprayed side, however, showed no change (not that I expected any that fast.

Two days later, the area sprayed with vinegar did die off a little, but not as much as the boiling water part. I had read somewhere that adding salt to vinegar would increase the solution’s weed-killing powers, but that actually wasn’t the case here. That side seemed to grow even more weedier. Do not feed your weeds vinegar and salt!

Area two shows the same results: Boiling water killed the weeds, but the vinegar was a bust. Today, a few weeks later, the areas treated with boiling water still have no weeds growing, thankfully.

Know of any other chemical-free ways to keep weeds at bay?


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