(air whooshing)
- Welcome to DIY for Homeowners.
- We're Mother Daughter Projects.
- I'm Steph.
- I'm Vicki.
And today, we're doing a little weed control
at Steph's house.
- As you can see from the before picture
that I have a lotta weeds in my backyard.
I can't grow grass, but apparently, I can grow weeds.
So we wanted a natural way to take care of this,
and we are trying out a vinegar solution
in order to get rid of them.
So let's get started.
We're using 1/2 a cup of table salt
mixed in a half-gallon pitcher.
(light music)
Mom added the salt and half the vinegar, mixed,
and then added the remaining 1/2 gallon of vinegar.
Mom stirred in a squeeze of Dawn Dishwashing Liquid.
You can see we first tried 5% strength white vinegar,
which you can buy at the grocery store.
And here we're adding the mixture to our Ryobi
one-gallon battery-powered garden sprayer.
In order for this to be effective,
it needs to be a very sunny day with no rain
in the forecast.
And here we are starting to spray it on all the weeds,
making sure we didn't spray anything
we wanted to keep alive.
Within a few hours, the weeds started to wilt and brown.
But we noticed the 5% acidity did not have an effect
on the grass, vines, and more hearty weeds.
We used the same formula as before,
but used a 30% strength vinegar the second time,
and that destroyed everything that it touched.
We mostly cleaned up all the dead weeds,
but this one pile here.
This used to be grass and it's really easy to remove now.
Here again, this is spraying the weeds in my yard.
And this is the after.
What's left after the 30% vinegar is very dead weeds
that are really easy to pull out of the ground.
This was left after the 5% vinegar.
The weeds were dried out but not completely brown.
The dead weeds in this area were small enough
that they didn't need to be pulled out
after using the 30% vinegar.
When we used the 30% solution,
we put it in a spray bottle
to get a more controlled application,
although both spray methods worked very well.
We found this to be a great application
for killing weeds that came up between concrete slabs.
And after, we have a nice clean driveway.
This was the most impressive to me.
This is the 30% solution on the overgrown grass.
And this is about an hour after.
You can see how much it browned.
And this is after we pulled up the dead grass.
And we were able to kill these weeds and remove them
like they were never there.
And here are the last bit of weeds
about an hour later.
They all wilted and this is what was left,
which can easily be removed or left,
as it easily blends with my rocks.
Overall, if you have small baby weeds,
the 5% solution will probably be adequate
for those applications.
If you have taller more aggressive weeds
mixed with grass or vines,
the 30% would be a better fit.
- [Steph And Vicki] What we learned.
- Now I wanna make sure you know
that when you spray this on, it does smell like vinegar
around your backyard for like a day or two.
So if you really hate the smell of vinegar,
this might not be the solution for you.
- Just a reminder, any time you're using a chemical,
even something as natural as vinegar,
you need to be protecting your eyes and your lungs.
And that 30% is really potent,
and I would even suggest a respirator-type mask.
- And as you saw, the 30% really killed
anything it touched, so keep that in mind.
If you have weeds that are in grass or things like this,
this is probably not the solution for you.
But for me, it was perfect, because I had pavers
and I had rocks that it was on,
so it worked really well for that.
- Now there are a lot of suggestions to use epsom salt
in place of salt.
While everything I've read, the people have tested it,
that does not work.
So you need to stick to table salt.
- If you like home maintenance type projects,
give us a thumbs up on this video.
- We'll see you next time.
(beep)
- If you liked this video,
you might like these other two videos right here.
This is how we clean my siding with Wet & Forget solution.
- And this one will help you with your curb appeal.
- And if you wanna see some dog-related videos,
'cause apparently she's making a appearance.
- A cameo.
- (laughing) We'll put some links below to her videos.
- Yes.
- Hey, Mack, we're all done.
- Okay.
- You want a treat now?
Oh yeah, treat, treat.