Refactor My Garden

Natural Weed Killer

tl;dr -> salt, vinegar, and soap sort of works to kill weeds, really works to kill grass

The biggest and most obvious task I’ve got to tackle is getting rid of all the nasty weeds filling my garden. Pulling them is the first thought, but also the most painful, and according to the internet, not super effective, since it’s easy to leave roots in the ground that regrow next season.

Weed killer seems to be the way to go, but I’m trying to avoid causing a minor ecosystem crisis in my yard for nice bugs like bumble bees and butterflies. Not wasps. As far as I’m concerned they can take a long buzz off a short hive.

YouTube told me I could mix together vinegar, salt, and dish soap to kill weeds. So I did. And it did. At least, to some degree. What you see above is the result of one application a day or two ago. The leaves are burned, but it seems like there’s a long way to go to have an effect on those hearty stocks.

Unfortunately, the vinegar solution is super good at killing grass, too. ☠️

I’m a software engineer, and I just moved into an older house with landscaping whose original beauty is now overgrown and choked by weeds. The fountains aren’t working. The wooden retaining walls are rotting, shifting, and falling. All in all, it feels like the in-real-life equivalent of and old, unmaintained software project that needs some major “refactoring” (a software term that refers to changing, fixing, or updating without completely starting over).

I’m not a gardener, though. So this is like refactoring an old project while learning to code at the same time 😂.