Saturday, June 29, 2013

Salting The Driveway... In The Summer

Experiment time!  

I live in a rural area and have a gravel driveway.  A long gravel driveway.  Over a mile of it.  And the rampant growth of all things green is resulting in a ton of weeds sprouting up between the gravel.

So far I've just been mowing it down, but the weeds spread a little more each year.  I don't want to spray chemicals all over the place but I didn't seem to have any other options.

Until, that is, I remembered from my highschool Latin class that the Romans supposedly salted the earth of defeated cities to punish them since applying salt meant nothing would grow there pretty much ever again.  I knew Latin class would serve me well!

Upon remembering this I IMMEDIATELY went to the local grocery store and bought 2 containers of the store-brand table salt ($0.44 per container) and lightly sprinkled it on the weeds in the gravel.  I waited 24 hours... and nothing happened.

I took more salt and sprinkled it more heavily on a small patch of weeds and they did turn brown and seem to die!  AH HA!  DIE, YOU MISERABLE WEEDS!  *cough, cough* I mean.... it seemed to work, but needed further testing.

According to www.straightdope.com "How effective is salt as a herbicide? If you use enough of it, real effective."  That sounds promising!

This afternoon I poured on enough salt to visibly coat the gravel in a small test patch, and I'll see if this works.  

For this experiment, I want to track:
1.) If the weeds are successfully killed
2.) How quickly the weeds die
3.) How long the weeds are prevented from regrowing in that area

UPDATE
See the results after 24 hours, and after 48 hours

Untreated Gravel (to give you an idea of the problem):























Salted Gravel (as of 7pm on June 29th):


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