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Gary350
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Posts: 7396
Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:59 pm
Location: TN. 50 years of gardening experience.

SALT makes good weed killer.

When I lived in TN I would pour 1 cup of salt right on the plants I want to kill. We had a lot of trouble with wild onions and dandelions. Dew every morning was enough to give the plants a drink of salt water. Plants were dead in 2 weeks and the tiny 3" dead spot in the grass was gone in 3 more weeks.

Here is Arizona we have super weeds. Dandelions here have stickers like cactus. Most weeds here can not be killed by Weed-b-Gone and Roundup. I have to buy special poison for these weeds if I don't do something to kill the weeds HOA is sending me notice letter in the mail. Salt kills the Arizona weeds. I buy 40 lb bags of salt at Lowe's for $4 and divide it among 6 large 5 gallons buckets of water. Salt disolved in the water then I pour it on the yard. Wow every things is dead in 3 days and seeds will not grow in salt either.

If you live where it rains alot just pour the salt on the yard and let the rain do the rest.

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rainbowgardener
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Posts: 25279
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:04 pm
Location: TN/GA 7b

Salt is herbicidal. It kills weeds and every other green thing. Most people find it is quite persistent in the soil and you will have a dead spot there for a long time. When the Romans conquered Carthage they salted the soil to destroy their crops and make it impossible to plant there for a long time....

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LeaSmea
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Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 10:10 am
Location: USA, Zone 6a

As the others have said, yes it will kill a weed...but it will also kill anything else.

(Fun fact: In times of war, invading armies would 'salt the fields' of their enemies killing the crops and insuring that none would grow for a very long time. It was a tactic to starve the enemy lands into submission).

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ElizabethB
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Posts: 2105
Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2012 12:53 am
Location: Lafayette, LA

Yes salt kills things.

The problem is the residual sodium in the soil. My sister was having problems with her landscaped beds. She had a soil test done and found high levels of sodium. The problem was her water softener. She started disconnecting the softener when she watered her beds. Even with the copious amount of rain in south Louisiana it took over a year to get the sodium down to an acceptable level.



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