You can buy it online, Stan. Just search for pickling vinegar. I can’t remember where I got mine - I think from my local garden center, that has a big canning supply section.
You need to add salt to to the vinegar. 1 pound of table salt per gallon of vinegar and a squirt of a dishwashing liquid (any basic dishwashing liquid) . Worked on all sort of weeds. I use this around my pond because I don’t want to chance anything getting my trout. A little salt, vinegar and soap won’t hurt the 1 acre pond.
Mike
I’ve seen it at Walmarts. But I have found that with the salt even the regular 5% vinegar works too.
Mike
Good to know, Mike. Between you and Patty we may well have a good and simple answer.
By the way, my dad used to say that geese were good at clearing out johnson grass because they’d keep at the rhizomes until the plant died, but that he’d just as soon have johnson grass …
:-)M
Sodium is a strong herbicide. The problem is that it will stay in soil for a very long time or can leach to areas where useful plants grow and kill them. After Romans defeated and destroyed the Carthage, they sowed salt into its soil to make sure the place will be barren and abandoned forever.
2 Likes
You know Stan, that had not crossed my mind- good that you brought it up.
I assume that in well drained acid soils such as mine it would be less of a problem, but in alkaline clay you’d be asking for trouble.
Certainly worth some research before anybody starts using it on a large scale (although I sure don’t see too much of a problem on sidewalk cracks and the like.)
One of those winter time tasks is mulching the perennial beds (trees & berries) with all the leaves that the fall gave me. Then all year I throw garden waste/clippings on top of that. I used to have a compost pile then realized that was extra work. Now I just compost on top of the perennial beds.
This may sound strange to y’all, butI have an intuitive sense that what we call ‘weeds’ are nature’s remediants for what the soil actually needs. Haha, but not between the bricks on my patios. Now I just weed whack them.
I tried the vinegar/salt thing. It didn’t work very well and then I also had the sense I was imbalancing the soil…I mean, if a weed won’t grow in it, it’s bad, very bad.
I don’t find it strange at all to think of weeds as remediation- I think there’s a great deal to it. The right weed is just misunderstood- but the wrong one is a toxic chemical repository ready to poison the competition, or a viral disease that smothers it with love! (Spotted knapweed and meadow bindweed).
"To everything there is a season … " ay?
:-)M
Did you ever have to navigate a field where gesee have seen fit to be the lawnmower?
Did you ever step into goose byproduct?
I’d rather have the Johnson grass. 
Mike
1 Like
Ready for an anecdote? 30 years ago when we moved here dandelions covered the yard. In naturopathy (my field) it is thought that ‘dandelion root moves calcium’. Being an incurable experimentalist, every 4 months I limed the soil. No ‘weed killer’…just lime. By the next spring the dandelion population was greatly decreased. I continued. By the next spring hardly a dandelion to be found.
We live in a 45-inches-of-rain-a-year zone which, according to Steve Solomon Gardening When it Counts, washes our minerals, esp calcium, down into the subsoil. Dandelions were the resultant remediation.
From an ‘Intelligent Design’ foundation I can’t reason a ‘bad weed’. Now don’t jump on me. Toxins in small doses are medicinal - even poison ivy. So there may be an intelligent purpose to those noxious weeds which we have not yet figured out. That said, they don’t rule my property.
Sorry for venturing off topic. Just of offering a different point of view, perhaps.
4 Likes
JA, I read your biography and you are a real smart cookie, rocket scientist and Dr., but I didn’t follow liming the soil and killing dandelions. Did you move minerals and replace them with enough calcium to be toxic or improve lawn health enough to crowd the weeds out?
No offense meant, just wanted your reasoning.
In my opinion, vinegar is the best weed killer there is. Problem is it kills everything in its path is you apply it in too broad of an area. A glug (my scientific measurement) at the base of weed will kill it fast.
My mom used it when I was growing up. Pretty effective.
Hey Phil,
I just limed using a spreader the way most people do to spread lawn amendments - not heavily either. I don’t think I killed dandelions at all, but rather made the soil less than suitable for their growth. And I forgot to mention that the soil became more suitable for growing clover!!! I never planted clover (nor the dandelions, of course) but in the remediated terrain, the clover thrived and the dandelions didn’t. Kinda follows “If you build it they will come”
IOW you can kill the weeds or read the weeds and remediate the soil. Now, I’m not talking about weeds in the patio, but gathering the data that nature presents and stewarding the earth accordingly.
Pat
2 Likes
I just think that this is a very sound approach through and through. (In my mind it’s the logical equivalent of saying “there’s a reason for everything”).
Different areas face different challenges that challenge us if we get too comfortable, though. I was amazed by what kudzu has done in my old home town in northwest Arkansas, and spotted knapweed and dyer’s woad, among others, are flat-out scary around here. They are missing their counterbalance and we need to deal with that. The question is “How?”
I favor natural biological controls, but they’re not always going to do the job. Environmental controls (such as liming the lawn) are substantive and workable when one has the insight. But sometimes -we’re talking plum curculio and spotted wing drosophila and such now- I’m willing to reach into the chemical aresenal in the same way that I’ll take antibiotics or squeeze a little clotrimazole or hydrocortisone out of a tube.
Man got out of step with nature a long, long time ago; many would argue that eating that apple in Eden means just that. I just don’t think we’ll ever retrace those steps and get a do-over in time. We’ve leapt into the sea and must now swim. So we go on seeking ever more knowledge to deal with the round robin of problems our knowledge has got us into! We may or may not pull it off.
This is not nature gone bad so much as us out of step with nature, but that doesn’t really speak to the point. The point is the question of how we’re going to deal with nature, and to what degree we rule, what degree it rules us, and how we can compromise.
Stay tuned.
1 Like
Pat, You indeed, are most welcome, forgive my bad manners, please.
A little of my background, I was a professional turf manager for 35+ years, mostly growing bluegrass sod. The idea of modifying growing conditions to favor one plant over others is especially something I’m familiar with. We planted in the fall so weeds wouldn’t compete with the grass seedlings, mowed the grass tall to smother weeds (never considered a mower as an herbicide before 
) grew white sweet clover to fix N and break up compaction etc.
I agree totally about the observation of action/reaction and using that to our advantage, just a different use of terms to describe it. Enjoy your time on Scott’s forum, most of us do!
This article is a couple months old, but I just came across it tonight. Interesting method of weed control.
http://news.aces.illinois.edu/news/weed-blasting-offers-new-control-method-organic-farmers
Vinegar + Salt. but like many organic applications you’ll need a few rounds.
I’m not sure what your situation is, but I’ve had incredible luck with heavy duty landscaping paper (the woven stuff) around trees and shrubs. It also warms up the soil.
Effective mulching or fibercloth I think would be easiest and most economical. Also walnuts are known for producing compounds which inhibit plant growth.
So if you have a walnut tree nearby you could try to make a walnut tea from the leaves and husks to spray as a weed killer.
You might also try permaculture methods such as three sisters.