Monday, July 7, 2008

THE  VINEGAR  THING (extra entry)

"...Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them..." (from Matthew 13:30)

I’ve posted this tip on my blog at least once before (quite awhile ago) and I’ve put this information out as mass e-mailings at least twice before, but I thought I’d share it again this year:

This is around the time of year that many of us are bothered with crabgrass, wild grasses, and all sorts of other weeds growing up through cracks in our driveways and walkways or through cracks in the sidewalks and curbing in front of our residences.  Sometimes the weeds can grow a foot or more high or spread out (like crabgrass) all over the place and look TERRIBLE.  If you’ve ever tried digging up and pulling out the weeds you know how frustrating that is, and many times you’ve done further damage to your driveway in the process! My father used to pour gasoline on such growth.  Gasoline kills the weeds but it’s hazardous, and will potentially do damage to asphalt.  There ARE some pretty good weed killers sold at hardware stores.  The problem is, many of them are at least somewhat environmentally hazardous, also, and most of them cost a lot of money.

Seven years ago, my friend Dave Connell gave me a WONDERFUL tip!  He told me the thing to use on that unwanted weed growth in your driveway cracks, walkway cracks, and sidewalks and curbing  is VINEGAR!  That sounded crazy, but I tried it and IT WORKS!  In fact, vinegar works better on those weeds than conventional weed killers do, and vinegar is NOT harmful to the environment!

The thing to do is buy the vinegar in gallon jugs.  You can find vinegar in gallon jugs in the salad dressing aisle in almost any supermarket in America.  Prices do vary widely.  I will say that the place with usually sells it for the lowest price in the Boston area is Market Basket, but I did get some jugs of vinegar on sale a few days ago at Stop & Shop.  I usually buy the white vinegar, but cider vinegar works just the same.  Depending on how much of an area you need to treat, buy two or three or four jugs, and pour vinegar directly on the weeds you want to kill.  Within 24 hours you’ll see them dying and in 3 days they’ll be brown, wilted, and dead! In the past I’ve told people not to do a vinegar application just before the torrential rains of a thunderstorm as that could weaken the effects of the vinegar.  Well, this week, I applied the vinegar just a couple of hours before the torrential rains of a thunderstorm.  The vinegar worked just fine and all that water on top of it seemed to have NO detrimental effects!

I’m so glad Dave Connell gave me this great tip!  Hope you’ll try it and share it with a friend!

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