Salt driveway weedkiller ?

[Jethro_uk]

Posted recently about the profusion of weeds *since* having my driveway weeded and re-sanded.

Fed up with fiddly chemicals etc (which are of limited use).

What are the implications of buying a sack (25Kg ?) of rock salt, and laying a strip at the top (drive is sloped to the road) of the drive, and letting rainfall and gravity do the rest ?

Do I have to worry that the lawn is adjoining the drive ?

And if that will work, are there any problems with sprinkling salt all over the driveway in front of my garage (I've seen thicker tissues than the layer of tarmac there ?)

I have no problem if nothing ever grew in those spaces before 3000 A.D.

|Is it better to dilute the salt and pour as liquid, or just dump a load of dry salt ?

[Chris Hogg]

What's the drive made from? If it's concrete paving, then I wouldn't do it. I scattered salt on a concrete pathway one icy winter, and thereafter wherever the salt had landed, the concrete slowly disintegrated. Maybe it wasn't very good concrete in the first place.

OTOH it's quite commonly done.

[Martin Brown]

Depends whether you like white crystals everywhere.

The really heavy compressed concrete slabs can pretty much handle it but anything less and the salt penetrates into cracks and helps make calcium chloride which allows more wet and frost in to spall them apart.

Some local council made a very expensive mistake with their paving slabs which could not stand up to having salt spread in winter. The slabs were cheaper but that was because they were not up to spec!

[Jethro_uk]

Block paving ...,

my main concern is leeching to adjacent areas ... Well, the grassy adjacent areas. The faux-tarmac drive the other side can die horribly for all I care.

[Jethro_uk]

I can live with that. Better than weeds.

[Martin Brown]

.

It doesn't leech very far even when there are big piles of rock salt on a hilly roadside waiting to be spread in cold wet North Yorkshire. The grass for about 3' down the hill suffers but that it all. It is quite ineffective especially on grass. It really isn't a very good weedkiller.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, it really isn't. get hold of sodium chlorate somehow.

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

I used plenty of ordinary table salt on some weeds two weeks ago. After about a week they were all dead, well, they are now brown. I suppose that they will come back though.

[harry]

Salt is a good weedkiller. For best effect, don't just chuck it about, dissolve in water and pour down cracks.

Or wait 'til it snows & then chuck about. Has the same effect.

Lasts about six months IME & then has to be done again.

[ss]

And if you find a source let me know, I am just about out and cant find any locally.

[Huge]

Its sale and use are both banned.

[Andy Burns]

When running your homemade paper mill, be sure not to let the used bleaching solution spill onto your block paving :-P

[The Natural Philosopher]

Just buy bleach and boil it up...

You wont even need to remove the sodium chloride.

For weedkiller purposes it should be fine.

Sodium hypochlorite is a standard swimming pool chemical and can be bought in bulk.

[harry]

You won't find any. It is a powerful oxidising agent that can be used to make explosives. Hence sales banned. You can thank our Parcki friends for this.

[dennis]

The Irish ones?

[tony sayer]

IANAC but how does or can you make the chloride to chlorate?.

The industrial scale synthesis for sodium chlorate starts from aqueous sodium chloride solution (brine) rather than chlorine gas. If the equipment for electrolysis allows for the mixing of the chlorine and the sodium hydroxide, then the disproportionation reaction described above occurs. The heating of the reactants to 50?70 °C is performed by the electrical power used for electrolysis.[

Humm .. perhaps not quite that simple then!..

[tabbypurr]

youtube.

NT

[The Natural Philosopher]

Dont. boil sodium hypochlorite (bleach).

You will end up with a solution of sodium chloride, (salt) and sodium chlorate. A very decent weedkiller.

[Scott]

I tried to Google Agent Orange but it seems to be difficult to get hold of too :-)

[rick]

There are lots of articles about using white vinegar to kill weeds - worth googling that ......... salt might make a lot of mess