I don’t do many posts on request, but I guess this is an exception.
In 2009 I wrote this post and mentioned I was going to use vinegar to try to kill the weeds in the gravel. At the time I was hoping for feedback from others who had tried something similar. Not only did I not get a lot of feedback, but pretty soon I gave up on the vinegar. It took a lot of vinegar, and it wasn’t really working very well. Since I made that post however, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic via Google, from people looking for solutions to weeds in gravel paths. Rather then let all those people end up on a post that lays out something that doesn’t work, I thought I would make an updated post here with what I find works well!
We have gravel paths all over our community garden complex, and the picture above is one that hasn’t been maintained in a few months. You can see it’s pretty well covered with weeds. You notice there are gardens on both sides, so the weeds either escape from the gardens next to the path, or more likely are from seeds blown by the wind. In a situation like this, I find a weed burner works pretty well to control the weeds.
Below is a picture of a similar path as the one above, but where I’ve been using a weed burner regularly to burn the weeds.
I last used the weed burner here a few weeks ago, and I’m pretty sure the gardeners on the sides have pulled a few weeds by hand too. You can see the weed burner is not perfect, but it does a pretty good job and is a lot easier than doing it completely by hand. The entire path in this picture, all the way to the end, takes about an hour to do with a weed burner and if the weeds are kept under control it only needs to be done every month or two during the growing season. Once it gets to the point of the path in the top picture, it has to be done weekly for a few months, until the weeds are under control.
The weed burner only burns off the tops of the weeds, and doesn’t kill them right away. It takes going over them a few times before they die completely. Some weeds aren’t killed by the weed burner, and have to be pulled by hand, but these are mostly the larger and easier to pull weeds. You also have to give some thought to what you have alongside the path, and in particular avoid flammable things like dry mulch or dry rotted wood. You also can’t use the weed burner in dry weather or when fire is otherwise a hazard.
As a rule it works better to make a number of quick passes over the path, a few days or a week or two apart, rather than one intensive burn. When you singe the tops of the plants, rather than turning them to ash, they are more likely to die completely over time. This is because singeing damages them, and causes the plants to expend more resources trying to repair the damage. Occasionally weeds respond better to having their tops burned off completely, and this tends to make the path look better, so it can help to do this from time to time too.
Above is an example of a path were the weed burner doesn’t work. This path has a garden on the left, and a grassy patch on the right, with no barrier between the grass and gravel path.
You can see too the picture includes the path in front of two different gardens, the one in the back is not quite as diligent in digging the grass out, and the gardener in front I know has a system of chemicals for spraying on the path. I don’t know what chemicals he uses, but he also says nothing he tried really works.
The weed burner just won’t kill the grass in this way. All that happens is you spend hours burning and reburning the grass, and it just comes back.
Above is a section of path, with my garden on the left. In this case, I burn the path in front of my garden, but not my neighbors garden. While I’m an organic gardener, this neighbor is beyond organic, and doesn’t want any power tools used in his garden either. He rightly considers the weed burner a power tool.
I’m not very diligent at burning in front of my own garden for some reason, and I hardly ever pull anything by hand that doesn’t get killed with the weed burner. That’s why there are still a few weeds in front of my garden. My neighbor can hardly be bothered to pull his weeds by hand. It actually works okay in this way, and the weeds don’t really spread much to my side of the path.
In the picture above, from time to time I burn the path on the left. One day I got into a big fight with the gardener on the right because I was burning his path (I previously had his agreement to do this), but he felt it was a too environmentally friendly way to get rid of the weeds. He said it was only temporary, didn’t get all the weeds, that the weeds come back too quickly and RoundUp was the only real way to get rid of weeds in gravel. He then got out his spray bottle of RoundUp and made a big point of spraying his path at the same time I was using the weed burner.
Since he made such a big obnoxious scene, and since I burn the paths around his so they look clean all the time, he’s under a lot of pressure to make sure his path stays clear or he’ll lose face. He has to prove RoundUp is better than the weed burner! He’s frequently out digging and redigging his path. From time to time it also looks like he sprays it, but that doesn’t really work because it doesn’t kill everything and he still has a path of dead weeds he has to dig up later anyway. You can see in the picture, his path has a lot of dug up dirt mixed in with the gravel, and it’s always about as green as it is in this picture.
I have heard from others that RoundUp doesn’t really work. There’s always lots of discussion over alternatives, but I’ve never heard of anyone finding anything they found satisfactory.
