Mutant Weeds, Tools & Vinegar
“Je vois que tu as des vaches maintenant”
(I see you’ve gotten some cows)
I was chatting to my farmer neighbor down the road and commenting on the two new additions to his farm. He’s a true local, born and bred, and we’ve gotten to know him pretty well over the past few years thanks to our daily walks with Polly. We call him “the Don” simply because it always seems like someone is at his house, paying respects. Turns out he’s just a popular guy (so far as we know…), and being a life-long farmer he’s always got something interesting going on with the garden.
“Eh oui, ils sont de mon copain. Je les ai empruntés pour désherber”
(they’re my friends’ cows. I borrowed them for weeding)“Ah oui?????” that was a new one for me….
Admittedly using cows for weeding is not something I’ve ever considered in my gardening life, but it seems to be quite a common country hack around here. Plus they have a triple-benefit. They’ll eat anything green, weeds and grass, so they mow while they go. And then of course, everything that comes out the other end adds a little fertilizer along the way. The Don insists it’s the only way to go.
Hmmmmm……
Our other neighbors have their own, unique approaches. The young family man just opposite the farmer uses goats, but since they’re a smidgen less discerning (goats will literally eat anything) his garden leans towards the super clean, “razed” look. On the other end of the spectrum the hippy guy further down the way prefers everything “au natural” both garden and otherwise, which means that most of the time you can’t see his house from the weeds (and most of the time, that’s not necessarily a bad thing).
And here I am just pulling the darn things out by hand….perhaps I’ve got the approach all wrong?
Weeds On My Mind
Weeds, you think about them a lot this time of year.
It’s late spring which means everything is in full growth mode. Buds have spring out, flowers are a-bloom, fruit is ripening & the lawn is a beautiful, intense green that needs mowing almost every week. Things are lush, and all the plants are competing for best-in-show.
Which includes the weeds…
Now, I’ve spent many hours of my life weeding, especially in my younger years (dear old mom made sure of that), so I have a fair experience in the matter. And I can confidently say that I have NEVER seen anything like the monster-mutant-ninja weeds that you get here in SW France.
They are beyond any earthly flora I’ve experienced in my traveling life, enormous and utterly invasive deviants that sprout like alien lifeforms out of thin air. Resistant to all eradication and stubbornly persist ant they’d take over the house if you let them. And anything not weeds is at constant risk of extinction. One day you have a nice, neat little flowerbed, and the next it’s covered in eight-foot-high mutants.
Where did my flowers go???????
So we all weed A LOT, and display our catch much like fishermen at sea. Check out the size of this monster!! But we also try to and find a balance between insanity and garden, which I think is a compromise everyone has to come to here in our area France. We keep our flower & veggie beds small, and pretty much leave the rest of the garden to itself (apart from mowing). It’s really the only way to stay sane.
Or maybe we just need to borrow a few cows?
All Tools Must Be Hardened Steel
We’ve also learned that “regular” garden tools don’t cut it here.
You see our soil, much like the weeds that thrive in it, is of a particularly extreme sort. It’s clay-based which means it transforms from a thick, treacle-sticky mud (when it rains) to rock-hard brick (when it dries) with only a few days of somewhat normality in-between. That means any kind of “easy” weeding can only happen precisely one day after it rains, and if you happen to miss this magical window you’re reduced to hacking with sheer brute force through something akin to concrete. It’s tough on the old back, and (so I’ve discovered) on tools too.
Which we learned the hard way…
Early on in our France experience I naively bought several garden tools from the local shop, thinking they would probably work out just fine. Ah yes, the beauty of inexperience. Or as Monty Python would say ” I fart in your general direction”.
The tools weren’t exactly cheap and yet they lasted exactly 10 minutes in our brick-soil before bending beyond all recognition. Useless, rubbish, sub-par-alloy metal. This is when I realized that the one and only 20+ year old trowel that we have in the shed, the only tool that has withstood the mutant southern French soils is made of a forged high-carbon steel. Of course it is!!
Clearly what I need is better materials, which as a materials scientist I really should have known ahead of time. Think stainless steel, boron-hardened steel….yesssss, that’s the ticket.
And so the search for the perfect set of Garden Tools has been launched.
Thanks to my ever-helpful Facebook gardening forums I now have a several new options on my wishlist, including this Edwards Tools Bend-Proof Stainless Steel Trowel this DeWit X-Treme Hand Trowel. and this 5-star rated Japanese Weeding Sickle (Note/ all these links are Amazon links #commissionlink). I’m also very taken by the entire line of tools at Dutch company Sneeboer & Zn. They’re pricey, but they’re serious, quality stuff.
Just goes to show that weeding is like any other rat-hole…there’s always more “toys” to buy.
Vinegar Is Love (& Destruction)
The other thing we’ve learned to love in a new way here in countryside is vinegar.
Now we’re not newbies to the miracles of vinegar. During our RV years we removed most of the hard-core chemicals from our life, both for cleaning and personal hygiene. So we were already pretty familiar with vinegar both as a cleaner and disinfectant (for floors, surfaces etc.) as well as a conditioner (for hair). But what we’d never heard of before we settled into la belle vie Française, was using vinegar to weed.
“It’ll smell a little like a chippy for a while” explained one of the English members on my gardening forum “but it works like a charm”
A “chippy” for those of my blog readers who may not be in-the-vernacular-know is a good old-fashioned English Fish & Chip shop. Deliciously yummy if you find the right one, and sheer perfection when your “chippy tea” is drizzled with salt & malt vinegar (trust me on this one). But I digress….
The point is that vinegar is really the best way to handle a larger area of weeds, in an mostly-organic way. That and basically just cooking the weeds either with boiling water or a propane torch (which does kill the tops, but sadly not the roots). This is especially important here in France where glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp) has been banned for personal use, and the chemical-free movement is strong (there are 5 French cities, including Paris that have banned synthetic pesticides within their boundaries altogether). Not only is going organic the right choice, but also the necessary one.
So yes, vinegar is our new weed-killer. We use a magic mix of ~1 gallon of high-strength vinegar, ~1/2 cup of table-salt & a few drops of dish-washing fluid (as a surfactant, to help the product stick), applied directly to the weeds on a hot, sunny, dry day (this is key). The acetic acid strips out the foliage’s waxy cuticle, while the salt essentially dries it out.
And yes, it works like a charm.
Mere hours after you apply this combo, as long as you do it in direct sun, your weeds will already be weeping their last goodbyes. It’s not permanent and it’s best used in areas you don’t want to plant anything else. Plus it won’t last nearly as long as your old chemicals did (especially if you have super-human mutant weeds like we do), but it will keep them at bay, at least for a while. We use the product in our driveway, on-top of hand weeding and for the past few seasons it’s worked pretty well.
We love our vinegar 🙂
And We’ve Gone “No Dig” In Our Potager
The other big thing we’ve gotten into here in France is the whole “no dig” movement.
Dating back to early 20th century (Masanobu Fukuoka did pioneering research work on natural farming in 1938) it’s gained renewed interest over the last 30 years. Perhaps one of the best-known modern-day promoters of this method is Charles Dowding who has been cultivating no-dig since the 80’s and has created a ton of info about it, both on his website, through books and on his popular YouTube channel. We’ve been soaking up the latter like mini-sea-sponges and have already implemented his methods in our potager (veggie garden).
Honestly it is pretty darn revolutionary.
No dig, no bother….just cardboard, compost, a bit of time and go. Couldn’t be easier. Plus our veggies love it too, to the point that they’ve been noticed by others. I was complimented on my salads by a local French guy the other day, which I consider a rather defining moment in my life as a veggie gardener. Either he was chatting me up, country-style (oh, your salads are so beautiful, so leafy, so large…), or we’re on the right track in the green department. I’m going for the latter.
So there we go….a blog about weeds, which wasn’t at all the topic I expected to write about when I sat down today. One moment you’re relaxing with a glass of Calvados looking out at the Pyrénées, and the next you’re laser-focused on that mutant thing that’s just sprung out in the flower-bed. Such is life.
So my dear readers tell me, are weeds on your mind? Or do you have a magic cure? And for those fulltimers amongst you, do you miss those wistful weeding days? DO comment and share below!
I go out every morning to pull the weeds popping up through our brick patio (no mortar between the bricks). They are lovely broad-leafed, clover-like weeds, but they have to go because I am so much happier when I see a “clean” patio. My mother taught me to pull at the base of a weed to get that dang root, so that’s how I still do it. She is long gone, but in a weird way I feel her nearby as I pull weeds. It is my exercise for the day and my moving meditation.
If the weeds become overwhelming, I will try the vinegar treatment! Good idea!
Beautiful salad greens, by the way! Enviable!
I have to admit! During your description of using vinegar to thwart the approaching menace weeds, I remembered the old song:
“ There is something on your mind
By the way you look at me
There is something on your mind, honey
By the way you look at me
Can what you’re thinking bring hapiness
Or will it bring misery”
Certainly not written about the same subject but the weeds may be thinking the same thing.
My imagination goes full tilt occasionally
Ha! Thanks, for this fun article Nina. Normally, I wouldn’t have weeding on my mind but being stuck at our RV lot in Benson, AZ, these past 4 months and planning to stay put a while longer, I, too, am dealing with weeds after the spring rains, and decided to try to grow a couple containers of cherry tomatoes. I’ll give the vinegar weed killer a try because I don’t think borrowing cows will be an option.
Your salads are big and beautiful!
Cheers,
Lisa
.
Weeds….. I think we all need to just stop arguing with them and let them be…..they’re programmed to grow anywhere, in any soil, with lots of moisture or none at all. They survive being eaten and dug up and sprayed with vinegar (and, yes, we love malt vinegar on our fish/fries), burned, tromped on and sworn at. So, why do we fight? Some of them even sport pretty flowers for us despite the nasty way we treat them.
Perhaps we need to find some new recipes featuring weeds, or use them in our flower arrangements. Then, I guarantee, they’d die.
Yes! Vinegar and salt and soap! Tried it for the first time a week ago, and it worked. My landscaping is mostly rock and I’ve found that this solution works best on weeds that are small, like mainly less than 3-4” tall. It works especially well on those little inch tall weeds peeking through the rock. I’m very happy to have tried it and that it worked for what I needed. Great topic, thanks!
Deanna
I have lived in Arizona for over 40 years and I am constantly surprised by the rock hard soil! We call it caleche (sp?). I have treated it with all the recommended additives; mixed in garden soil; and, even tried vinegar to break up the salty, rock-hard ground. Everything looks promising for a few days. Until you forget to soak the garden. Then it turns to cement and your plants refuse to grow any further… My only success was to dig out a bowl of ground and put potting soil for the plant. It would grow fabulously; soaking in the Arizona sun. Then one day, the ground would solidify. And I would realize that, once again, the clay had snuck into the potting soil little by little until it could choak the plant to death! I moved. No more garden. Only native bushes that are tough enough to wedge themselves between the clay molecules… And, of late, a few metal flower sculptures have managed to satisfy my need for color.
Thanks for the smile. Currently without weed. I mean, I don’t have weeds….well, I have weeds but I have no good weed story to tell. But, I sure liked yours and – again – learned a thing or two. And drool over those pics of the Pyrenees!
Thank you, once again, for a lovely post, Nina. I always love it when I see your email pop into my box. Now, regarding weeds, funny thing you ask. We hunkered down for COVID-19 during April and the first half of May north of San Antonio, TX. This is where my niece is, who just had her first baby. Mom and dad were tired and busy with baby, they live on an acre, most of it was weeds! So we spent a month clearing the front yard of weeds and trimming trees and bushes. It took us weeks on our hands and knees pulling weeds! Thankfully, rains had loosened the soils.
My husband ordered the “Red Dragon” propane torch to help with the weeding, and wow, that changed everything. We did not try the vinegar and salt thing, but they had done it before. But oh my, it was super nice to get their whole front yard, probably about 1/3 acre looking spiffy.
Now, we are up in Washington, on Big Lake for an indefinite period of time. The weeds are not too bad here, as the yard is much more established. The bigger problem is goose poop as flocks of Canadian geese, with their cute furry babies, are all over the back yard! We are planting some veggies from seed and planning a big harvest come August/September, it will be fun.
I tried the vinegar and salt thing in our North Ranch yard where it worked but only for a short period of time. Did you know that in old west days a prostitute was called a chippie?? :))
NO I DID NOT Janna!! That is soooo interesting…a chippie, eh? I am going to read up on that. Thank you for that interesting little tip.
Nina
Just looked up that Red Dragon propane torch…now THAT is a serious torch!! I don’t actually think I can buy anything like that in EU (probably not legal here LOL), but I’m going to look around. It would be nice to have a back-up to the vinegar method.
Nina
What a wonderful and lovely post! I have felt badly not commenting on several of your past ones and have yet to extend my condolences on the death of Rand. Your 2 remind me so much of ours and it just breaks my heart to have witnessed all the love and care you gave them. I have had pets my entire life and know they won’t outlast me but each and every time it is a major blow.
As I read this one I was nodding my head in agreement about the soil and the weeds, except I am in the mid-Hudson Valley. The only time I have been more amazed by weeds was when I lived in NC andcould literally watch the growth of kudzu fro the beginning of one 12 hour shift to the next. Having just spent 4 days digging and building a pond (more like making my 24 year old son dog while I built) I am well tired of the soil and am ready for a break.
I started using the vinegar, salt and soap weed killer a few years ago and for the most pary find it very helpful. I will sometimes pour boiling water on the stronger weeds a few days ahead which also helps. I also do this along borders when I want to make sure to avoid the plants I don’t want to kill as I can see the droopy ones. For things like plantain lilies I also poke a hole in the ground to get the root.
We were not so successful with the no dog methos as our soil is so attrocious that while the cardboard from our moving boxes and months worth of newspaper broke down the ground underneath was just too devoid of nurtrients I guess. We had toyed with the idea of having a veggie garden while here for stay in place but since it looks like the borders to Canada may reopen by July and that was our plan for this year we’ll forego it this year. I have done straw bale gardens in the past and this will be our next approach.
Lat thing, while I read this article posted by a friend whose father was Danish I thought of you. That lead to the realization that I had not read your blog this week. So, though you may have seen it already (or your sister may have sent it) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/as-denmark-reopens-its-people-are-back-in-their-groove-meeting-eating-and-feeling-glad-theyre-not-swedish-hbzc3s92m
We were given the same weed-killer recipe when living at the beach in the Yucatan. It works! Not forever and not as thoroughly as RoundUp, but so much safer. I need to keep this recipe locked into my memory for when we have a yard again, because weeds are everywhere. I have also added the Japanese weeder to my Amazon wishlist. Enjoyed this post! Now that we’re all staying home, weeds are a thing we must deal with, right?
Vinegar is wonderful. Here in Texas we have fire ants. They are very tiny, but cause very outsized pain. They grab you with their pincers and then inject poison with their stinger…and I have the scars to prove it. Yes, I loathe them. They are hard to kill without using really nasty poisons of your own, but vinegar poured on their mounds does them in. Works even better if you heat it first. Our ground is clay…the hot vinegar reacts with the calcium and foams up, ends up sealing the nest. It is purely sinful how satisfying it is to see the destruction.
And I used to think I was a nice, kind person…
Oh, fire ants!!!! YES, we had a run-in with them when we traveled through Texas years ago. They are nothing to laugh about. I would vinegar those things in a milli-second.
Nina
Glad you have found no-dig. I used it in our Southern California garden and it is so successful. Because it’s very dry the top dry 2 inches had to be stripped, composted, then re-applied just so the compost could remain moist; the layers below were never touched though. The big advantage in SoCal is that at the end of harvesting your veggies, just turn off the water for a few days, and the weed problem disappears quickly.
We are fulltime RVers who still miss our garden, so thank you for your blog as our connection to countryside and garden.
I hate to say it but I really enjoyed your post on weeding. We are on Vancouver Island and in the midst of planting, growing and getting ready to harvest things like our winter garlic and early spring onions at a large municipal garden plot.
And of course we are weeding our little hearts out.
Thanks for suggesting the vinegar mix for weeding larges patches. I am going to try it. One question, what do you use to apply it? a spray bottle? or something else.
Enjoy your summer and keep the posts coming.
I use a hand-pump-activated spray bottle (like the one you see in the picture I posted). It’s a little more effective than a simple spray bottle, as you just need to pump it at the beginning, and then you can spray for a good while before you have to pump it again.
Nina