Roundup Weed Killer

Ammonium Sulpahamate was for years a great weed killer until the EU, or rather I understand the Irish contingent wanted some extra tests that were expensive and not supported by other members. It can still be used as a composting accelerator but not as a herbicide/weedkiller on open ground. It has a interesting property of breaking down over a bit of time, 3 ~6 months to provide a nitrogen based fertiliser making it  great for the clearance of land that will be used for cultivation and so it is still widely used – but only outside of the EU. Sodium chlorate is another good weed killer though that can have other uses which are not so well appreciated by most people. Its persistence is far greater than the sulphamate so it is not so well suited to land for cultivation and it may leach into ground water where it will be stable and poisonous for some considerable time. Neither is currently licensed for use within the EU, though all weed killers beat the heck out of hand work when your hands are fairly crap.

Resolva contains di-ammonium glyphosate along with other packaging components to achieve its active status. So both Roundup and Resolva are essentially similar apart from detals of their formulations and neither appear to be very long lasting.

I hold no truck for either Monsanto or Merck so I am not aiming to support any such enterprise. All such products can have undesirable effects if misused, e.g by using them as drinks or hand lotions or breathing in fumes etc.

Sadly such uses have been tried either accidentally or by intent.

Sodium chlorate brings back happy memories from my first job after Uni and the days of post-grad training. Some 22-25 years old friends of mine all shared a big house. Like most young males they had zero interest in gardening, and the resultant was a garden that resembled a jungle and brought down the ire of their neighbours and landlord. Something had to be down and sodium chlorate weedkiller was both cheap and plentiful, so they sprayed it very liberally all over the garden. Instant death resulted to the jungle and the garden soon became a brown wasteland tinged with white crystal specs during that long hot summer.

Unfortunately one night one of the young men threw his lit cigarette end into the garden. Very shortly afterwards what could best be described as a unconfined explosion occurred. By all reports there was a huge flash and whoosh — all the dead vegetation turned to ash along with most of the garden fencing. Cue for more irate neighbours!

The rest of us young grads did a ROFL , when this tale was recounted in the local pub. The consensus was that trainee salesmen with Arts degrees were unsafe to let loose in public.

johnbarry wrote:

Maybe go back to killing the weeds with a shovel (or Hoe), chop chop, slice slice.

John – that process does wonders for the visible bit above ground, but the advantage of the above mentioned weedkillers is that they also kill off the roots below ground as well.