Weed control

I used to tell people that I hated to garden.  For years, gardening to me was going out and digging out huge dandelions from the beds that took hours and only looked marginally better, and only for a few days.  Surprisingly, this wasn't fun.  Once I got the weeds under control and I was actually able to do the fun part, planting vegetables and flowers and enjoy a weed-free bed, I really LOVE to garden!  Getting rid of the weeds is the trick.  Don't get too excited, I'm not going to share some magic words that you can say from the couch that will make all the weeds disappear.  It's work, but once you get them under control, it's really just maintenance.  Every Sunday in weed-season I go outside and pull the little guys that are peeking up.  At the beginning of the summer, it took me an hour, but as I kept pulling them and pulling them and pulling them, it only took a few minutes at the end of the summer.

Now is the time to kill the weeds.  I'm telling you this as someone who waited too long last year and I was literally pulling weeds from the back bed that were up to my shoulders.  This is still the worst area for me, because I let it get so bad, but in my defense, last year was the first year I used it as a bed and not just a dumping ground for sticks and branches.  I meant to dry this new thing I read about on Pinterest, and also in a few gardening books, but when that part of the yard was being mulched I was inside making dinner.  I'm going to suggest it anyway because I think it really would work.
You've probably heard of putting down plastic before you mulch, but newspaper or cardboard is also supposed to work and it's greener.  It will kill the weeds, then decompose.  I'm going to put it down under my raised bed, when I get it. Along with this, is the obvious.  Mulch!  Put LOTS AND LOTS of mulch on those weedy beds!  I've found that a few inches (3-5) on really weedy beds will make a world of difference, not only to kill the existing weeds, but it makes it much easier to pull out the new ones that grow.

I blogged the other day about not using commercial weed killer.  I have tons of weeds sprouting on and around the patio.  I need to just get down and pull them, but I thought I'd give my homemade weed killer a true test and see how it did on heavy duty weeds.  It kills everything, so don't use this in your flower beds.  I'm just going to use it on the patio and in that back bed that had the monster weeds.  (It's super shaded and under huge pines so there's not enough light AND it's too hard to dig around the roots to plant anything.)  Here's the recipe:

Mix it all up in a spray bottle and kill some weeds!

Fill a spray bottle 1/2C salt.  I had some cheap salt I got at ALDI that I used to make playdoh for the kids.  Add a good squirt of dish soap, then fill the rest of the bottle with vinegar.  I read that you should use pickling vinegar because it has a higher acidity than traditional vinegar, but I had this cleaning vinegar that was 6% and it work well.  Shake it up and spray!  (I actually let it sit for a few hours to fully dissolve the salt.)

Does it work?  I sprayed these weeds Saturday.  It rained all day Sunday, which I thought would just rinse it away and help the weeds grow, but it didn't!

Dead Weeds after only one treatment!

This was a HUGE mess of weeds!  This was after two applications.  It looks like it might need a third.  Or instead of taking pictures,  I could actually bend over and pull this monster out!

I *THOUGHT* it was my homemade weed killer, but maybe it was actually THIS that is killing my weeds on the patio.