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Weeds are a pain, but BBC Gardener’s World presenter Mark Lane has a brilliant, cheap, and easy method to kill weeds.
How to kill weeds
Mark uses baking powder or vinegar, or a mixture of both to kill his weeds.
The expert said: “There are a few simple, really handy homemade remedies for getting rid of weeds. One of those is baking powder.
“With baking powder, all you need to do is literally smother the whole of the weed with the baking powder.”
How does baking powder kill weeds?
Mark explains: “It actually goes into the leaf and goes down into the root. That will actually kill the weed eventually.”
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Mark also recommends using the household item of vinegar.
“Another one is with vinegar,” he said. “Create a vinegar solution with sort of just a little bit of water and then spray the weed. That will then also kill the weed.”
Vinegar is quicker than baking powder, he explained.
“Now, the baking powder will take probably a couple of days in order for it to start working.
“The vinegar will be really quick. It will start working really, really quickly.”
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Both methods come with a warning from Mark, however, and that is to be careful where you use them.
“The only thing about both of them, you can’t get the baking powder or vinegar on your prize ornamental flowers because that will kill them as well,” he said.
“So it’s perfect if you’ve got weeds on your drive, or a pathway or among your patio or balcony.
“Then you’ve got no fear of getting anything else around.”
However, a clever trick can enable you to use the method more safely.
“If you don’t want to use insecticide or pesticide and you want to use baking soda or vinegar in your borders, you can create your own tools from cardboard,” Mark said.
“So, buy a piece of cardboard and just roll it up to a cone which would fit over the plants, and go around them, so you protect the plants. That way you’ve protected your plants on the outside.
“You can also do a mixture of both. So you could do baking powder with vinegar just to give it a little bit of an extra saturation on the leaf.”
Mark also recently discussed how to kill slugs by attracting wildlife to your garden.
Lots of wildlife will eat slugs and snails, making the gardener’s job easier.
This includes the likes of birds, such as thrushes and robins, hedgehogs, and toads.
You can attract wildlife by planting a native edge of hanging up a bird feeder.
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