killing/clearing weeds with salt (NaCl) ?

[Jethro_uk]

Because moneys a tad tight atm, I can't afford to do the proper job to fix the "tarmaced" drive surface in front of the (unused) garage. The actual space is about 4mx6m square, and enclosed on both side by a brick wall.

Because I've seen thicker tissue paper than the layer of tarmac, it's become a veritable meadow. Despite frequent applications of "weedkiller".

Following some threads on here (and kicking myself for knowing the history of Carthage !) it seems the simplest - and possibly most conclusive treatment is simply to cover the area with salt - sodium chloride - and let it kill the weeds and poison the ground to prevent regrowth.

There is no danger I will ever want a lawn there :)

So the question is really, what is the best way to go about it ? How much salt would be needed, and is it a case of just laying it down, and leaving it, or does it need to be protected from rain for a few days (plastic covering) to prevent it being washed into the gutter ?

[Cursitor Doom]

It would be wonderful to think casting salt over the earth would kill every living thing on it and in it forever, but sadly it doesn't work that way. Every poison washes out in the end. :(

[Jethro_uk]

Well, in the end, the sun is going to die.

But before then, 5 years of no weeds would suit me ....

[Cursitor Doom]

And just think of the tan you'd get!

[harry]

With Carthage it was a symbolic Roman thing they did.

In practice the weeds are killed. But after a bit of rain, they are able to comeback. So it lasts about six months in Summer with normal rain. Some weeds are resistant.

It works better if you dissolve the salt you've nicked off the highway in water and then sprinkle it on rather than just chucking it about.

Needs a good soaking.

[The Natural Philosopher]

make sodium chlorate out of bleach....or salt

[Thomas Prufer]

Try just the plastic covering, and see if the sun won't cook the weeds? Dunno if black or clear sheet would be better...

(Apologies if I have offended: I don't live in GB, so I don't know if "sun" or its lack is currently a sensitive subject.)

Salt didn't do a thing in my experience, but I sprinkled rather than poured it.

Thomas Prufer

[Brian Gaff]

Not only that but many areas of coast have vegetation which is salt tolerant, so I fear you may, if you repeatedly use this method, merely make some plants get replaced with other ones. Nature is adaptable. Brian

[alan_m]

Or as in roadside verges which get salted every winter you start getting salt tolerant weeds or it washes through in a matter of months

[Martin Brown]

It works in desert countries because there is no rain to wash it away. It will be very expensive and wasteful to no real effect in the UK.

You only have to look at roadside salt heaps on the hills to see just how ineffective it is as a weedkiller.

So much that you be for ever trailing it into the house. Use one of the Pathclear series of weedkillers intended for the job - although the modern formulation is nowhere near as good as the old one it still contains some element of germination inhibitor as well as a knock down.

[Tim Watts]

It's possibly not salt - could be the urea derivative?

[Mark]

Isn't is Sodium Clorate that is the weedkiller - not Sodium Cloride (common salt)?

[harry]

Sodium chlorate is banned because it is a bomb making material. Sodium chloride is almost as good.

[Martin Brown]

Or as the packaging so coyly put it may promote combustion.

Only in your crazy universe.

[Chris Hogg]

Loo paper soaked in sodium chlorate made jolly good fuel for a cigar-tube rocket, back in the 1950's!

I suspect he means as a weedkiller, although being Harry, who knows...

[harry]

I have tried both.

[Marland]

It took a lot of patience but filling a soda syphon sparklers bulb with the right mixture turned one into a very good torpedo,well at least until the fourth run when it must have suffered metal fatigue when shortly after launch it changed into a mine. Fortunately the water suppressed a lot of the blast so my knee only has a small shrapnel scar. The ducks were disgusted and took of never to return, their owner my chums mother who owned the pond was quite puzzled why they had left, we didn?t confess till we were in our fifties some 35 years later.

GH