Home Remedies for Killing Yard Weeds
- Any plant that grows in your yard may be a weed.green grass image by green308 from Fotolia.com
If your ideal yard is an unbroken expanse of grass, then any plant that grows there other than your lawn grass is a weed. Weeds may be another type of grass, such as fescue in a Bermuda grass lawn, or they may consist of wild onions, crabgrass or thistle. Although store-bought chemicals will kill these weeds, you can eliminate many of them with homemade remedies. - Hand digging is a method that works well for plants such as crabgrass and dandelions. These plants will not return on your lawn if you dig them up before they can form seed heads and if you pull up the entire root. Dandelion roots grow so deeply that it can be difficult to pull the entire weed up in one attempt. If you fail to pull up the entire root, the plant may return.
- Plants that grow in salty soil have more difficulty absorbing water from the soil through osmosis. This is why plants have a hard time growing along the sides of roads, where road salt can drain, as well as near the ocean where salt spray carries sodium into the soil. Desert environments also have a high salt content in their soils because the low rainfall of a desert will not carry salt away. You can apply salt to a plant to kill it by placing a pinch directly into the soil around the stem of a plant, or by mixing salt into water and watering the weed. Use a weed killer made of salt carefully, because salt will affect desirable plants such as turf grass as well.
- Vinegar is a natural substance derived from fruits such as apples or grapes. The high concentrations of acetic acid in vinegar effectively kill weeds by drawing the moisture out of the plants. Most kitchen vinegars do not contain enough acetic acid to kill plants. Pickling vinegars contain stronger amounts of acetic acid, and may be sufficient to kill weeds, though only above the soil. The root of the plants will remain intact, and may produce new growth. Plants with waxy coatings or hair-like leaves, such as those found in the desert, may not be susceptible to vinegar. These plants are resistant to losing moisture through their leaves due to the dry environment that they live in.
