Comment by delichon
5 hours ago
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it.
I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
As I'm sure you're aware, glyphosate is usually only appropriate as a weed killer on your property if you're looking to kill all vegetation in/around where you spray it. For example if you wanted to "nuke" your lawn by killing all the grass and starting over with new grass. It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.
If you've got some dandelions or thistle, and it's not out of control, the nice safe way is to pull them up by hand or, if they're between pavement cracks, pour boiling water on them.
Broadleaf weeds growing in your lawn that aren't easily hand-pulled can be killed with a selective herbicide like 2,4-d. Tough underground vine-style weeds like creeping charlie or wild violet will need a selective called triclopyr. Crabgrass is best killed by a selective called quinclorac. Yellow nutsedge requires a selective called sulfrentrazone or another called halosulfuron.
Selectively kill the weed infestations as best you can, get rid of the bad ones before they go to seed, and focus on the health of your grass -- in most parts of your lawn, healthy grass will out-compete weeds.
Don't spray herbicides everywhere (unless you're certain that's what you want or need).
Instead, just spray each weed a little bit, right above where the leaves connect to the stem.
When I really want to nuke it so that nothing grows, like in a decorative stone area, I use water softener salt. I dissolve it in a bucket of water until no more will dissolve then pour it wherever I want the vegetation to stop growing.
Anything there will die, and nothing will grow again for a long time. Although, it does spring back to life eventually. Usually once a year is sufficient.
I get a little paintbrush and paint the leaves of each dandelion with round-up - that ends up killing them but largely leaving other plants alone.
I learned to appreciate the dandelions.
How is this easier than pulling the plant out of the soil?
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I did much the same, but with a hypodermic syringe, on knotweed many years ago.
Yours is so much more.. tender though. Poor dandelions, but at least you made it personal!
Glyphosate is extremely effective as a targeted weed killer. It only impact what you spray it with. It does not teleport from one plant to another. It's also not strong enough to kill heathy mature plants with a small amount of overspray.
Unless you have an old Roundup bottle, you don't have glyphosate in it. From the Bayer website:
"The active ingredients found in our Roundup Lawn & Garden products in the U.S. are: fluazifop-p-butyl, triclopyr TEA salt, diquat dibromide and imazapic ammonium. These ingredients have been used safely and effectively in many different weed-control products from a variety of companies for decades."
"We have been very transparent about the new formulation of Roundup Lawn & Garden products and are no longer producing glyphosate-based Roundup products for the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. While Bayer no longer produces or sells glyphosate-based Roundup products – which are also EPA-approved – some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold. "
This is cool, & new to me. Do you know when they made the change? "some quantities may remain on store shelves until remaining stocks are sold" implies it was recently to the post, but I'm not sure when that was.
2023, so yea, there may still be some older product around.
I had a tree root growing through the driveway asphalt. My handyman told me to get Roundup Pro because it will actually kill the root, unlike the other herbicides. So I got a gigantic gallon tub of it. It was effective. Good to know that "the good stuff" is now found to be not problematic.
I wonder if that includes Roundup Pro, because they still have it as being glyphosate on their website:
https://www.rounduppro.com/products/roundup-promax-herbicide...
Weeds on the lawn: just use a lawnmower each week, the grass will usually handle being cut on a weekly basis much better than any weed.
Weeds between tiles / slabs or on gravel: just pour boiling water over them. The weeds will become mushy and die within 1-2 days. Repeat every 6 weeks during summer.
Source: we bought a house with a garden full of goutweed [0], which I consider the final boss of any garden owner, and which we have in control now through regular mowing / hot water. Goutweed will just laugh at any herbicide you throw at it, and regrow from its underground rhizomes. I also doesn't seem to require sun, because I have seen plants grow to a height of 10cm completely underground. The joke in my family is that it could grow on foreign planets. As Wikipedia dryly puts it: "Once established, goutweed is difficult to eradicate."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegopodium_podagraria
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
Thank you for making my morning coffee, consumed while looking down on downtown San Francisco, presently chock full of "AI" weeds, substantially more entertaining.
This is just a recipe to spread weeds everywhere. If you mow them, most of the time you’ll just break them open and spread their seeds
I you mow them after they have developed seeds, you are mowing them too late.
But if you then keep mowing the lawn regularly, those seeds won't be able to compete with the grass.
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Or you can learn the lifecycle of plants and don't let them go to seed.
I will hate the ground elder as long as I live (but did manage to eradicate it from our garden thru hard work, only to see it spring back up in our neighbor's yard, it's their problem (for) now).
I don't understand. What we call "weeds" are plants that evolved to grow quickly and spread quickly. Many gave segmented stems/leaves to resist core damage from cuts and pulls.
If it's dandelions, wait a few seasons (now that you've used Roundup) and then eat them! The leaves taste like arugula (the younger the better). The heads, when they bloom, can be dried, ground, and baked into cookie recipes. If you let the heads close, pick them before they start transforming into seeds and either pop them into your mouth raw while you're doing yard work or save them, bread them, and fry them up for a nutty flavor. The roots apparently make a good caffeine-free coffee replacement but who the hell wants to replace coffee?
How about not killing the weeds? One doesn't need to live a perfectly manicured pesticide-ridden hellscape.
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?
The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.
We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
Digging weeds and their roots up one by one by hand out of cracks in concrete/asphalt is much slower than spraying. Also much more physically challenging, which is a metric I didn't care about when young and able bodies but nowadays is very relevant to me. I'm not saying roundup is good, but there are plenty of reasons for it to be appealing. I haven't tried the boiling water method yet, it seems like it'd be easier than digging but harder than spraying, unless perhaps one has a mobile, outdoor source of boiling water.
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I rarely use weed killer on poison ivy to avoid coming into physical contact. Lawnmowers work fine for flat yards, but for steps down a steep embankment you really need a weed eater and weed eater + poison ivy is a major hassle.
In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
This is how humans had to do it for millennia- by hand. Backbreaking work. But necessary unless you wanted to lose half the harvest.
I dislike gardening and enjoy my apartment!
I live in an extremely high wildfire risk area. I also have an extreme rodent problem. Keeping the vegetation low around structures is indicated.
Keeping vegetation low is a different problem from removing weeds in a targeted fashion. A simple mower or trimmer should suffice.
You can do that by mowing, fyi.
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I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)
We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids eventually.
Some weeds are quite unpleasant, such as sticker burrs. I'd rather not have a dog and children covered in those.
Some weeds can be damaging to property, trees, sidewalks, etc. or are poisonous.
It's not always about being annoyed by dandelions in an otherwise overly fussed over sterile lawn environment.
Even then, spraying cancer causing chemicals into the land is beyond stupid. Killing yourself and the humans around your land for having a bit less work, one can't be more antisocial.
Pesticides aren't used to kill weeds.
Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
Pesticide is a catch-all term that encompasses herbicides, insecticides, fungicides etc.
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Why is something someone else enjoys a "pesticide-ridden hellscape?"
How would you like me to come and pompously shit all over something you enjoy?
How about letting him do what he wants with his own land and not insulting his ideal home?
What if I want to do something on my land that will poison the ground water for the area? What if I want to raise an invasive species on my land that will likely escape and devastate local wildlife? Should society be permissive and wait for the damage to be done before stopping me, instead of being proactive and stopping me from doing so before the fact?
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You're entitled to your own opinion, but imo the point of posting anything on HN is to subject yourself to feedback. That's what I gave. Feedback.
Their comment asked for an alternative.
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How about thinking about society and not just every man for himself? Clearly you didn’t read TFA.
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Sorry you think my Japanese garden is a hellscape.
Depending on weather and the site, a weed burner can be very effective for what people used to use glyphosate for.
For large areas, tarping can work pretty well in the summer. I accidentally cut a perfectly rectangular hole in my lawn by leaving a tarp on the ground as I was moving soil into containers. Enough sunlight was absorbed through the translucent plastic that it quickly baked the area underneath to death.
> I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective.
Doesn't the vinegar act pretty quickly? Keep the dog inside that afternoon, then hose it down in the morning.
Salt for cattle.
Lasts for a few months.
Places with common sense regarding human health do weed control with a small torch.
A garden torch is unreasonably effective.
you had to choose between vinegar and glyphosate, I'd use the vinegar. your dogs aren't going to roll around in a too-strong concentration of vinegar, it has a smell and if it were actually going to cause burns (what kind of vinegar is this, something from a chemical supply house? ) animals would be immediately repelled by it (plus it evaporates quickly anyway). whereas with glyphosate, none of that applies, it's a fully synthetic chemical that stays in the atmosphere for days, would not send any cues to animals, and its effects on animals may be long term, concealed for years, and fatal.
but as someone else said above, if this is a certain area that your dog wants to be, you can always pull weeds for that area by hand, just make sure you get the entire root.
Thanks for the advice. I bought 30% vinegar on Amazon. The instructions are to add in a little dish soap. Do you think that will safely repel the dog when dry?
The soap is a surfactant to make the vinegar stick to the weed leaves for longer.
It's not necessary, but it probably lets you use a little less vinegar, so it's probably worthwhile. I don't add soap, I just spray straight 30% (agricultural) vinegar in the small set of areas where a torch would be dangerous.
Dried vinegar does not irritate dogs. They will avoid the area while it smells like pickles.
A better chemist than I will hopefully corroborate this, but I think that the strength of smell is directly correlated to the reactivity of the acid. So when the smell is mild (i.e. near the level of household vinegar (5%)), the risk to skin and mucous membranes is low-to-zero.
I don’t think there will be much left of the vinegar when dried. Acetic acid is much more volatile than water. If it’s dry, it means that it’s gone. And it has an unpleasant smell even at harmless concentrations, if it’s not quite dry yet.
Glyphosate is perfectly safe at the levels we use it domestically. If there is a safety issue it's at commercial dosages.
absolutely insane that you held glyphosate and vinegar in two hands and decided to opt for glyphosate. vinegar will not hurt your dogs. use vinegar, or fire, or drench the weeds in water and pull them out by hand.
If it's low-concentration or diluted vinegar, then yes, but more for maintenance than to kill established weeds.
But industrial-strength vinegar is corrosive and harmful on skin, eye, and lung contact. If OP looked at the bottle and saw skin irritant or corrosion warnings required to be present on it (in the US, at 8% or higher acetic acid concentrations; in the EU, I think it's skin irritant 10-25%, corrosion 25%+), then it's probably that.
Garden stores often sell 20%-45% concentration vinegars, and YouTube/TikTok influencers often promote industrial-strength vinegar at 75% concentrations, at which point it'll damage turf on contact. And any repeat or large pour of high-concentration vinegar can reduce the soil pH deeper than expected, which can be harmful to nearby trees or other root-system plants.
You sound neurotic. Anyway just pull the weeds out with a towel and you hands, or use boiling water to kill them
Pulling weeds by hand works for a lot of weeds and is the most environmentally friendly solution where possible. It's what I've done, for the most part.
I will say for some weed species that can be ineffective or counterproductive, unfortunately, and for those a chemical (or other) solution may be in order.
Weeds can also be a sign of a potential problem, such as poor drainage, a leak, etc.
Nutsedge is an example of that. As I recall, pulling it out results in it sending more shoots up if you don't get the nut (which can be feet underground).
At that point, you have to continuously pull weeds on a daily (or multiple times daily) basis in order for it to use up more energy growing than it generates.
It likes water, so if it's there, it might be because there's standing water from rain.
I dug up a raised flower bed to get rid of it once. Nuts were absolutely everywhere because of poor drainage. I had to go down 2 feet I think to get them all, I replaced the bottom layers of impermeable clay soil with something that drained, along with a drain pipe or two.
Now the sedge is gone, the risk of foundation damage from being too wet is gone, and no chemicals were required.