Natural weed killer patio hack – no chemicals!
Natural weed killer patio hack – no chemicals!
Brick patios and pavers are a real pain to keep weed-free, especially if you don’t want to use toxic chemicals. Here is an easy recipe for natural weed killer that will eliminate weeds from pavers, brick or stone walkways, patios, gravel paths, sidewalks and driveway cracks for the entire summer!
What you will need:
- Several jugs of cheap, white vinegar (food grade, 5%).
- A hot, sunny day.
That’s it! Although it’s helpful to also have a bucket and a plastic broom. Some recipes advise adding other ingredients such as salt and dish soap, but I honestly find that plain vinegar works just fine if you really soak it in the cracks and do it on a hot, sunny day. Plus, I don’t want my patio to be slippery from the dish soap. If you find that you have really tough weeds that keep coming back, you can try adding some salt to your vinegar.
How this patio hack works
Vinegar is a completely safe, organic, natural weed killer. It will dehydrate any plant that it comes in contact with, causing it to shrivel up and die. It works most effectively on a hot, sunny day because the plant will become extra dehydrated. Vinegar does not discriminate on what it kills, so don’t get it on any plants that you don’t want to die!
Vinegar is perfectly safe for humans and animals (it’s an ingredient in salad dressing, after all). It will biodegrade naturally and does not harm the environment.
How much vinegar do I need?
If you have a brick patio like the one pictured above, I find it much less work to simply douse the entire patio with vinegar and use a broom to sweep it into all the cracks, allowing it to really soak in. Our brick patio is about 8′ x 11′, and I used 3 and 1/2 gallons to cover it. So that’s about a gallon for every 25 square feet.
If you’re using this trick on driveway and sidewalk cracks, or you have a patio with larger pavers, it’s more economical to only pour it down into the cracks and you will not need as much vinegar. For those areas I use an old bottle that I cut the tip off like this:
It’s a decent-sized bottle, but I do end up having to refill it several times to do all the driveway cracks and our other patio with the big pavers. It works a lot better than a spray bottle though, which I find just kills off the tops of the weeds and not the root, so they end up coming back very quickly. I like to make sure the vinegar really gets soaked into the cracks, killing the weeds at the root.
A gallon of inexpensive vinegar at the Marc’s chain here in Ohio costs about $2.00. So for about $10.00 – $12.00 I can take care of two patios and the driveway and have a bit left over for touch-ups throughout the summer.
Easy Instructions for De-weeding Your Brick Patio
I got a late start on this project this year, because here in Northeast Ohio, we had a very cool, rainy spring and early summer, which aren’t good conditions for doing the vinegar hack. By late June, my patio looked pretty bad:
It was almost July before I had a day free and the weather was finally forecast to be hot and sunny for a couple days in a row. It takes at least a few solid hours of hot sun to kill the weeds after you pour on the vinegar, and I don’t want to waste the money and effort and end up having to do it again later. If I do it right, this patio will look good for the rest of the summer, I won’t need to touch it again until next year! Let’s go:
- Remove furniture.
- Pull the bigger weeds. (You could probably do this without pulling any weeds, but I find that I can sweep all the vinegar into the cracks most easily if I spend 15 minutes pulling up whatever bigger weeds I can.) I usually do these first two steps the night before.
- First thing in the morning pour vinegar into a large bucket. I like to add a little water to stretch it, but I don’t dilute it too much, maybe 10:1 vinegar:water ratio. Dump around onto patio, using broom to sweep it into all the cracks.
- Rinse and recycle those plastic jugs!
That’s it! Word of caution: If you get the vinegar on the bottom of your feet and walk across the grass, it WILL burn your grass and leave yellow burnt footprints on your lawn. I take off a pair of crappy gardening shoes next to the patio, spread the vinegar around in my bare feet, then slip into my shoes to walk back, because there is no way to get to this particular patio without walking across grass.
The next day, the weeds should be mostly dead, and there will be a white residue.
You can rinse this off if you like. I leave it and let the vinegar natural weed killer do its work as long as possible. The rain will wash it away soon enough. After about a week, the weeds will be dry and crumbly. Give it a good sweeping and you’re left with this:
If you did a thorough job, your patio will be weed-free for the rest of the summer! I will try to remember to take a photo in September and update this post so you can see how well this trick held up.
Side benefit: Vinegar is a great cleaning agent, so if your brick is grimy and dirty, the vinegar helps remove stains also!
Update: How well does this natural weed killer last?
As promised, here is a photo of the state of my patio on September 1:
As you can see, it has held up pretty well. I have not done anything to this patio since the vinegar hack in late June, aside from sweeping off some leaves and dirt. A few weeds are popping up here and there, but I could easily pull those out in a minute or two. So on the whole, this trick has kept my patio pretty weed-free for the whole summer. It’s a winner!
Can vinegar be used on a patio made from concrete blocks with a granite top?
Unfortunately, I think vinegar might ruin the granite, I have seen warnings about not using acidic cleaning products on stones like marble and granite, and vinegar is very acidic. If you do a Google search on vinegar and granite, you’ll find a lot of warnings about it. I have a vinegar cleaner I use around the house, but I do not use it on the granite countertop in the bathroom.