Pulling out every weed that every passing bird plants on your garden is a tedious task. As in medicine, prevention indeed is always better than cure! Perhaps you can keep from breaking your back every so often when you use these simple home remedies to help you deal with weeds.


Boiling Water: Check which plants you want to kill, and cut off their tops. Boil some water on your stove, and when it is boiling, pour it right onto the weeds. Be sure to pour it from a low height to keep from splashing the hot water onto other plants you want to keep. The boiling water will burn the weed as well as its seeds, which keeps it from re-growing in your garden.

Vinegar: For weeds that are less than two weeks old, you can use vinegar to snuff them out. Put vinegar into a spray bottle, and mix with some water to make a 20% solution; then coat the weeds evenly. For younger weeds, cider or white vinegar can kill them, but for older ones, find a more acetic vinegar, like pickling vinegar. Just as you need to be careful when pouring boiling water, also be careful that you do not get the vinegar on any of the plants you want to keep, as vinegar is a known as an “equal-opportunity herbicide.” For a more accurate spraying session, you can cut off the large end of a plastic soda bottle and put it over the weed you want to kill; then, spray through the mouth of that bottle.

Rubbing Alcohol: You can also spray the weeds with a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and water. What happens when they get sprayed with rubbing alcohol is that the alcohol causes them to dehydrate, and then die quickly. Then again, just be careful that you do not get the mixture on all your other plants. You can use the same method in making sure you hit the right plants.

Corn meal: In addition to killing the weeds as they grow using the above home remedies, you actually have ammunition in keeping the area free of possibly sprouting weed seeds. You can sprinkle corn meal on the spaces you want to keep weeds away from, as it hinders the growth of seed. Of course, just make sure you do not sprinkle the corn meal in areas where you have other seeds planted that you hope to grow.

Mulches: Mulches are a great way of keeping weeds from spreading in a garden. Not only do mulches cool the soil and retail moisture, they are also very helpful in weed control. Both organic and synthetic mulches smother weed seeds. Similarly, if you happen to want to grow some of the self-seeding plants in your garden, it would be best to mulch only in the later part of spring. By that time any self-seeding plant would have begun to grow so you can decide which ones you want to keep and which ones you want out.