Quick tip this morning before I get to peeling roasted chiles. A few weeks ago Rick discovered something that should have been quite obvious.
Boiling water kills weeds.
In the past, when we’ve done some canning, Rick takes the boiling water out and dumps it on the weeds growing between the cracks of the sidewalk to kill them. One day we realized this water would kill not just the weeds poking through the cement, but the weeds in the garden too! (Duh!)
Be careful with this – boiling water will kill any plant, good or bad. But if you need an easy, cheap, chemical free weed killer – boiling water will do the trick!
Any other obvious tricks out there that we don’t know yet? I’m sure there are a billion. Please share them here!!
Sometimes it’s the little things.
The Lazy Homesteader 
Well that will sure beat the roundup I put off spraying…thanks for advice.
Sure will! And yay for NO round up! Down with Monsanto! 😉
This wouldn’t work for a bed with desirable plants in it, but our favorite method for dealing with a large area of unwanted weeds or grass is to cover it with layers of wet newspaper (we don’t get a newspaper ourselves, but we borrow out of the recycling bin at King Soopers). If we have weed barrier lying around (Tim’s dad gives us random useful stuff), we put that on top and then bricks or rocks to hold in place. Free. Easy. And within 6 months to a year the area is pretty much weed free and ready to be dug and planted. We did this to our whole front yard to get rid of the grass and dandelions in order to plant something “real” and have pretty much zero weeds among our herbs and pumpkins. The newspaper closest to the grass is usually biodegraded with the grass but the upper layers go right back to the recycle bin. We’re helping someone else reuse before recycling. 😉
I have some brick pavers in my mow strip, and they are filled with weeds! We keep weed whacking, but it never occurred to me to make good use of the canning water… Thanks for the idea!
we pour boiling water on ants piles to kill the ants. I don’t think it usually kills the queen but certainly cuts down on the number of ants.