homemade weedkiller

See post #35

 

EU product and licensing laws apply to how things are sold - they are restrictions on shops and manufacturers - not us! Once you take it home, it's up to you how you use it on your own property, as long as you don't poison someone.
As long as we're not selling any products here, there's absolutely nothing wrong with discussing the effects of household substances on plants. There's absolutely nothing wrong with advising anyone anywhere on what mixtures work best!
Lordy!

 

EU law does not say salt is dangerous, it merely requires that anything used as a pesticide be approved. That's "used", not "sold". Stupid it may be but the law applies to home-made weedkillers. So, by default, salt is effectively banned as a weedkiller because no-one has bothered to test it. Testing is not a trivial matter either - a certain well-known product used for killing honey fungus could not be tested because of the excessive expense and is now sold as a path cleaner that happens to be damaging to the fungi that trees may be hosting

I agree that well-established safe materials "ought" to be approved at public expense, but the question is then where one would draw the line. Soap? Vinegar? Iron sulphate? Bleach? Carbolic acid? Caustic soda? And would you want the tests to be compliant? It's not just the expense either - approval cannot not be given without testing on live animals. Would you put salt and vinegar into your pet Labrador's eyes? What about bleach? Anyway, it's not going to happen.

The good news is glyphosate is out of patent now, so M. do not have a monopoly. Typically a bottle of concentrate that will treat 100 square meters thirty times over is about £15 so it will cost you £1 a year if you spray twice. On the other hand, excess/residual salt is very harmful to garden soils. Clays which have been laboriously worked into crumbly, rich, garden soil turn into a sticky unworkable mess. Why use a really terrible weedkiller like salt when modern synthetics are so much better? Of course glyphosate is rather slow but it's not the only herbicide on the market. If you want instant results, get a flame gun. Just don't use salt!

 

I agree. I don't see why the government shouldn't test "Salt" etc. What I think is needed is some scientists "skilled in the art" to decide if the product is likely to pass the EU test, and be effective at what it has traditionally been used for, and if that's the case then the test should proceed. I think in the case of Salt that there is likelihood of collateral damage from runoff / into waterways etc, such that it may not be a good home-made solution to the problem; in the event that such a test fails then the usage can actually be published as "dangerous" so folk can stop doing it (less assume that there is a undesirable side-effect found that folk don't generally know about)

Their newer formulations still have patent protection and I for one am using them (whether I/we like Monsanto / Monsanto's behaviour is the subject of a different debate ).

Monsanto's latest formulation does not have a hazard symbol; the active ingredient, Glyphosate , never has as it is only mildly toxic, but the adjuvants and surfactants have been poisonous / hazardous, and therefore put the user, and others, at risk, but Monsanto has now found effective alternatives that are not hazardous. So my preference is to use their brand in case I am stupid and splash some in my eyes, or get some on my skin etc. or a child finds the container ... or a host of other, admittedly avoidable, "maybes".

Dunno if that safer formulation is available to Joe Public as yet though ... its available for sale on Ebay of course.

 

Well, the "sales pitch" here is actually EU approval and has a hell of a lot of research behind it. An amateur's experience cannot compete with that. But we don't have to choose. We need all the information we can get and take it all, with ummm... a pinch of salt!

 

Well, of course I had to look up stevia - Wikipedia tells me that an anonymous tip-off (!!!) led the FDA to ban it and this was followed by a world-wide panic. It does sound remarkably like a conspiracy. Off-topic, but what was your involvement in clearing its name, if I may ask?

I agree that we need to be very cautious when a company's own research shows that their product is harmless. [irony]I suppose we should be grateful for our increasingly litigious society to keep them in check [/irony]. One day, when I rule the world, making Bad Science (BS) claims will be a capital crime even if no-one is harmed... that's after I get Criminal Stupidity onto the statute books

 

They asked their competitors to test their product ???

 

Oh, I see. Pretend to be testing something you're interested in selling but make it fail so dramatically that it gets banned. There's a word for that, but I don't want to be ejected from the forum Makes you proud to be a member of the human race, doesn't it?