As more and more people recognize the importance of environmentally friendly methods of weed control, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that homemade herbicides are great, safe alternatives for the environment. Using borax weed killer is one way to help get rid of weeds without causing too much damage to the surrounding area.
Why Would I Use Borax Weed Killer?
You might wonder why you would want to use borax in the first place if there are many other herbicides available. There are many reasons that you might not want to buy a pre-made herbicide product.
Many herbicides are made with toxic ingredients. These ingredients can harm your soil and any plants that you might want to grow there in the future. Additionally, often herbicides are produced by companies with questionable ethics and motives. Monsanto, for example, is one of the world’s biggest producers of industrial-strength herbicides.
Spending money on natural alternatives like borax helps to feed money into healthier industries. If these companies manage to get a bigger foothold in the gardening industry, more natural alternatives will become available.
Borax occurs in nature. The chemical component of borax is sodium borate, a water-soluble crystal. Borax has a lot of uses: it works as laundry detergent and can help to sanitize your household. It can also be used as an effective weed killer.
How to Use Borax Weed Killer
The most important thing for anyone hoping to use borax weed killer is to learn how to use it properly.
The first thing is sourcing your borax. Lucky for you, that’s pretty easy. You can find borax all over the place: at hardware stores, grocery stores, and even some pharmacies. It’s fairly cheap and can be easily stored in its crystalline form.
That said, once you actually mix up your borax weed killer, you should use it as soon as possible. Here’s the easiest way to make a good borax herbicide.
- Dissolve 10 ounces of borax in 4 ounces of warm or hot water.
- Add 2.5 gallons of water.
- Mix.
This recipe should get you enough herbicide to cover about 1,000 square feet of property. Naturally, you can adjust the amount of water and borax to fit your needs.
To actually apply the borax, all you need to do is load it into a garden sprayer device. Spray the leaves of the plants that you’re hoping to get rid of and enjoy watching them shrivel up.
Borax is a fairly strong weed killer that generally only needs to be used once a year. It’s best used in springtime. Borax is nonselective and kills anything that it touches, so you should avoid using it for more than two years to prevent damage to your soil.
Conclusion
Borax is one of the best natural weed killers that you can use. It’s strong and effective and in most cases only needs to be used once a year.
If you think borax is a bit strong for your needs, then you could consider using something like baking soda. Baking soda weed killer is another natural alternative that isn’t quite as potent as borax. You can also get creative and use steam to get rid of weeds.
