When winter finally starts to subside every year, we look forward to spring in our yards, working, playing, and relaxing there. But with spring comes, for many of us, spurweed along with it. So how do you get rid of it, especially if you’re averse to chemicals? Will vinegar kill spurweed? Do other household products work?
A Natural Herbicide
While most weeds are merely annoying, what with their unwanted presence, seeming invulnerability, and theft of water and resources from the plants we want, spurweed goes beyond that. Spurweed hurts. It can stick you and your pets and cause pain.
If you pull the weeds out by hand, you’ll get them out, but you will possibly (likely) also do two other things:
- Force the plants to drop seeds, meaning you’ll have to do this again next year, and
- Fail to get every bit of the plant’s roots out (they tend to break off rather than pull completely out of the ground), meaning they’ll regrow, and you’ll have to do this again next year.
Rather than try brute-forcing them out, consider vinegar, the wonder liquid.
Vinegar has acquired a kind of mystical, works-for-anything status. We use it to descale household items, remove rust, eliminate certain odors, and even help assess the pH levels of your garden soil.
It also kills weeds, which is great if you’re fighting spurweed. However, there are a few caveats to keep in mind when attacking spurweed (or any other unwelcome garden occupant).
Don’t Bother Diluting
Some people add water, Epsom salts, and even dishwashing liquid, but no reliable data exists on whether these help. Adding water only decreases the weed-killing power of vinegar.
Vinegar Isn’t Smart
If you spray vinegar on the spurweed in your yard, that spurweed will die. But if you also accidentally spray it on the grass surrounding the weed, it will also die. Vinegar doesn’t know what plant you want dead. It’s not like it’s kryptonite for spurweed only.
Maybe Don’t Spray It
If spurweed lives among your grass, spraying it will, as mentioned above, kill everything. Instead, use the admittedly labor-intensive paintbrush method. A small paint brush allows you to paint vinegar onto the leaves and stems of offending plants.
This won’t be pleasant if you have a yard completely overrun with spurweed, but if your yard is that far gone, you may be better off with commercial chemical products, anyway.
When to Treat Against Spurweed
Spurweed seems like it shows up in the spring because that’s when it produces its spiny fruit. That’s the part that pokes you in the soles of your bare feet, but it’s also the part that drops seeds and leaves your yard pregnant with next year’s spurweed, just waiting for the right time to show up.
Seeds tend to germinate in the fall months, so if you use a chemical pre-emergent, the time to use it is before they germinate.
Apply post-emergent products in the winter months after the first stems appear. This can happen with chemicals or vinegar. The idea behind post-emergent weed treatment is to hit the weeds in the window between their appearance and their dropping of seeds. Killing them before seeds fall means a much better chance of fully eliminating spurweed from your yard and gardens.
Will Vinegar Kill Spurweed: Final Thoughts
Vinegar can be a valuable gardening aid, removing weeds and unwanted grasses and such. However, apply it carefully, since you may not realize your prized salvia isn’t a weed. Vinegar will kill it as dead as it will spurweed.