Homemade weed killers ... a tutorial and results

I really dispise spraying chemicals all over the place ... seems that you need a gagillion chemicals around your house for cleaning, pest control, weed control, and all sorts of other things. I have seen a lot of neat ideas for storing all of these bottles of stuff on Pinterest lately, but what I would really like to do is take a different approach.

First, I would like to reduce the number of chemicals in my house significantly! Second, I would like to take a more natural approach for tackling these things. Lastly, I would really like to have more space for things I actually want in my house and not so much space dedicated to stuff I dislike having in my house.

Therefore I have been really researching homemade remedies for things. Now, it would be wonderful to say that I could eliminate my need for weed killer 100% by mulching and pulling weeds. However, since we live on almost 7 acres and I love to garden veggies and flowers ... I am fairly realistic that I don't have what it takes to maintain all of that without a little weed killing intervention.

So ... I have seen several recipes for weed killers that are a mixture of distilled white vinegar and diswashing soap. Which is absolutely fantastic since it is the same two things that I am mixing together for tub, shower, sink, and general bathroom cleaner. You can find a post about that here: http://mooremagnets.blogspot.com/2012/01/skeptical-about-homemade-cleaning.html

So, I am trying out the recipe for 1 quart white vinegar with 1 tablespoon of Dawn dishwashing liquid.  I have to note that the mixture that I am using today has more Dawn dishwashing liquid because I am using my partially empty bottle of the shower cleaner mixture which is 2 parts white vinegar to 1 part Dawn dishwashing liquid.  However, at the moment I don't have another spray bottle empty.

Here is the weed ... I gave it a good spray

 

And this is 24 hours later - Please note that we have not had any rain and our temperatures just barely reached freezing, so no frost was involved.

 

I am actually pretty pleased with the results on this particular weed.  However, there were several others that I sprayed and the results were not nearly as significant.  So, this morning I poured more vinegar in my mixture to make it closer to the 1 quart to 2 tablespoons recipe.  I will update you again in a few days!