I am starting a new job tomorrow. The details are short - managing a maintenance team for plant design.

They said that i will have to use Round-Up at some point.

I don't want to contribute to the problems of the world, but I need money. Can we work together to find an alternative "weed control" method?

I am very occupied, currently. So - I need help. If you have suggestions or can point me in a good direction, I would appreciate it.

I am a chemist. I can make whatever is needed. I just don't know what to make. Some of you know these things... or at least parts.

Can you help?

Thanks
ACY

10%-20% vinegar with limonene and dish soap has worked well in my experience. Some people report only using 20% vinegar on its own with success.

I will give that a shot, experimentally at home.

I had a thought. I worked with thiols. Those are sulfur based compounds. In my research, i oxidized and reduced the thiol, forming disulfides and then reducing back to the thiol.

Cysteine is an amino acid that has a thiol tipped residue.

Could the protein structure be targeted and form a disulfide or reduce a disulfide to deactivate that protein. It could possibly alter the structure of the protein, but rendering it inactive. This could inhibit growth? Which protein? Why? Would it cause adverse effects?

I don't know. I decided not to be a bio chemist. LOL. Anyways. There are other biochemists here.

Acetic acid works, says prax.

Dog piss kills plants.

What about a solution of buffered ammonium acetate?

Or, in addition urea/ureaic acid?

Afaik acetates do the trick as well might wanna look which counterion is best, prolly some that arent too bad for the soil as well. Ammonium acetate is too volatile in my opinion.

Things formerly used were NaClO3 but that has quite some drawbacks (mostly flammability because spraying an oxidizer on dry herbs is not a good idea as well as toxicity)
Straightup fire works as well. Usually you would use a gas torch for that. With a weed burning attachment thing.

Is it just about removing the plants or do you need to plant something after?
Also what kinds of plants for what reason?


I think the best thing would be a foliar spray of acetic acid + surfactant/solvent.
A leaf is a rather fragile thing. Washing away the wax layer and burning it will quickly damage a leaf beyond repair. Solvents can be anything thats eco friendly like ethanol or even just water. But i would imagine a solvent will help destroying the leaf better than water. Surfactants help with more waxy and fatty plants and some of em are eco friendly. You would need to reapply it though. Since it wont kill the roots.

Also literally just salt works as well. Just use any road salt and just pour that over the plants and it will kill it. A combination of vinegar and salt will kill a plant on the foliage and at the roots.

Harvest the plants for medicinal purposes

Establishing proper biology helps a ton. Weeds are pioneer species and thrive in anaerobic bacteria rich soil. Get some aeration and fungi/mycorrhiza and established root networks in the soil and there is no need for pioneer species.

The best "weed control" is cover crops, aka soil armor/living mulch. Nature abhors a vacuum and she'll always try to cover bare soil. Beat her to it.

For insects your best bet is plenty of biodiversity in color/scent and predatory insects to eat em up.

Roundup releases a new version in some areas recently which is JUST acetic acid...


The only thing to do is make the area/soil/land healthier and plant what you want there. If there are weeds they need to be dug up and composted. Meanwhile add compost/good soil to the weeded area and put down cover plant seeds.


There is no "quick fix" but once you get something good established it should stay established.

Same thing for money... I turned down a job recently working landscaping/horticulture because the clown running it refused to listen to reason.. The end does not justify the means.





Edit:

If you use roundup the same problem is going to come back, and worse, along with new problems. Also it will affect the rest of the environment (ME and everyone else).

Plus roundup costs money. Compost is free and seeds are cheap/free.

If your boss won't listen to you and you still decide to go along with it maybe just explain this directly to the customers and ask them what they want done... And then if it comes down to it you could refuse to do it if they wanted you to.... This is what I would have done if I didn't get into an argument with the guy that was going to hire me

Another approach to localised control of undesired plant species is use of a blowtorch (Unkrautverbrenner over here). These can be gas-powered or they may use hot air from an electric heating coil.

Hi folks, thank you for the reply so far. I agree the biodiversity is most important. However my customers want things to look a specific way. That's out of my control. Anyways, my new job requires me to travel a lot so I'm not going to be home very often. I ask my wife to turn off the experiment that I was setting up. Maybe one of you could test it out for me?

Perhaps a comparative study of an ammonium acetate solution side by side compared to vinegar? If there seems to be no difference, then I'll play around with the urea

Oh, by the way. I asked my dad to check for me and he said that they sell urea on amazon.com

Oh I forgot. In the aquarium industry there's a concept called vinegar dosing. It stimulates a certain bacterial growth that consumes excess nutrients like nitrate and phosphate. I wonder if a similar application could be used here?

Oh, never mind. I remember why that concept might not work. The bacteria take a little while to grow and they require consistent dosing. If only I had become a doctor and known how to take the concept of time release medication and apply it to ammonium acetate salts. Oh well

Depending on which plants you have, you could also use the natural herbicide Tricolorin A. But it is certainly not as all destructive as Glyphosat, which just kills everything, if not adapted (by natural selection or genetically in the lab)

It gets built from the vine Ipomoea tricolor, and it is thought that the rotting old plants like that prevent other plants in the vicinity from growing and therefore their new seedlings get an advantage.

It is a tetrasaccharide macrolactone and can also be synthed, but probably cheaper to get it from the plants.

The key question is, if your plant also gets affected by Tricolorin A or not. E.g. traditionally in some areas in the world they grew these vines on the field, then ploughed them under, and then planted their plant of choice (e.g. this is done traditionally for sugar cane in some areas)

There's actually quite a lot of research going on on modifications of this one, to be able to make a new synthetic herbicide, which is then patentable and if possible more effective or specially selective etc (you know the business...).

Acy you need to tell us what plants exactly so we can look for an approach to this problem. Please also try to reply to the questions i had in the other thread.

You can also have a different approach. For example people grow rice in water because the rice tolerates it and it kills all possible bad herbs and keeps pests away. Same thing could be applied here but that depends 100% on the plants and the weeds. SO thats why you need to tell use more stuff.