Flower Bed Weed Killer?
 

I need something that will kill the weeds in my flower beds but not the flowers/plants. Any suggestions for commercially available products or home-brew?

Your hands. Or a hoe. :laughing:

Seriously, I'd love to hear something along these lines, but all the herbicides I've seen either specifically state that they're not for use around flowers or that they're complete herbicides (kill everything).

I use the kill everything mixed in a little one pint hand sprayer. I only spray the leaves of the weeds and don't use it when the weeds are mixed in with the plants themselves. The kill everything stuff works through the leaves so it doesn't hurt the root system of adjacent plants you want to keep. We also use the granular fertilizer in the plastic shaker containers early in the season to head off the weeds. That and deep mulch!

Instead of a sprayer, I used a sponge (and rubber gloves! ) to apply the weed killer to the weeds in my yard. It took some time, as I did my entire front lawn like that, but I got very good results. Very little lawn damage, and very efficient weed death.

for killing weeds around food crops, there are few things that work better than vinegar!

There's an organic vinegar/something else mix called burnout, which kills everything it touches very quickly.... you can use normal white vinegar on small weeds as long as you coat the surface of the leaves... mix it with a little soap to act as a surfactant and get it to spread all over.

You can also use vinegar to acidify the soil in places you never want to grow again, like driveway cracks and gravel driveways and whatnot. Once you want the area to grow again, mix in some dolomitic limestone or other basic-ph-adjuster and yer back in business!

Just be careful applying the stuff, as it doesn't discriminate between weeds, grasses, and good plants. You can also upset the soil pH by allowing too much on the soil, but it's easily corrected by mixing in dolomite lime.

Nothing can discriminate between weeds and good plants, actually, because the ones that don't kill lawns work by targeting a specific hormone only present in dichot plants (weeds and flowers) which isn't there in monochot plants... to tell if something's a dichot or monochot, look at the veins on the leaves - if they're parallel, it's a monochot, and if they branch outwards or run into each other, it's a dichot and will be killed by that kind of poison.

The above is a guideline, not a rule, so if you've got something you really care about, make sure to look it up. And never use those herbicides near food crops.

You did mean in landscaping and not grass, right? Because Ortho makes something called Weed Be Gone for grass and it works great. I keep that in a tank sprayer and walk the yard every few weeks. Hardly have anything to spray if fertilized well.

Once you kill the weeds, keep them from coming back! This stuff works like a charm.

http://www.preen.com/newpreen/index.jsp

Only thing that killed the weeds for good in my flower bed was time. I filled the bed with perennials that bloom at different times, they grew into each other and left no room for weeds. Took about 6 years though.
Every place else, I've been using vegetable oil or boiled water. I'm gonna try that vinegar trick though!

I agree 100% with that. It is the stuff I was talking about previously but I couldn't recall the name. Helps the flowers grow and stops those pesky weeds...:thumbsup:

The stuff with fertilizer is a little more spendy, but you can get "weed only" stuff too.

Edit: I'm a cold-hearted bastard, no fertilizer for my flowers! They have to earn the right to live.

In grass.
I had contaminated topsoil, and a huge infestation of noxious weeds. If I had sprayed it indiscriminately, it would have killed my lawn.

Landscaping (rocks, woodchips, etc.) is much easier to keep up with, as you don't have to worry about the weed killer contacting something it shouldn't.

I'll look up that Ortho stuff, I need truckloads of it.

Broadleaf killers will kill weeds but not grass (eg, Crossbow).

Correct. And you also need to determine if you have crabgrass as well, which requires something different.

When I purchased this house several years ago the yard was full of crab grass and weeds. It took one and a half summers to get rid of it all. I did a complete overspray with the hose container each year for two years and walked the whole yard 1-2 times a week with the tank spayer with a weed and crabgrass mixture.

This year, my fifth summer, I used no complete spray over the whole yard, no weed & feed (just regular fertilizer for than application) and spot sprayed once in just a few minutes. I'm basically weed free these days. But it took a lot of work the first two summers and the Ortho products are awesome!!