The only way I have found which is consistently successful (given that glyphosate is interdit) is manual removal - unfortunately through Covid the weeds “won” and our gravel is now a disaster area.
Which is making me think about alternatives. Is block paving a thing much in France. Don’t recall ever seeing much use of it for private dwellings.
Or resin bonded/bound gravel.
I have about 200m2 to do something with.
We have block paving, but it accumulates moss and weeds where we live at an alarming rate, and pressure hosing the moss off a couple of years ago pushed our water bill up to 300 EUR instead of the usual 60 EUR…We couldn’t use anti-algal products because of the potential run-off into nearby water systems. We tried burning with an electric torch, but that takes a very long time, and the best time to do it being the summer, is a massive fire risk, not to mention that the house has composite shiplap facades that we can’t go near with anything producing any significant amount of heat. Currently, we’re back to manual hoeing and pulling.
Around us it’s the old hideous versions that were around in the 70’s and resemble a really bad neck tie.
Bleach breaks down much quicker into harmless ingredients so would probably be gone long time before it got to the water courses, unlike antimousse that lasts for ages. Then just a little hose off or leave it.
There is a company on LinkedIn that are putting ground source heat pumps, shallow pipes into driveways and actually obtain good results,
If you do something less permeable think about where the water will go, as you don’t want to create a problem elsewhere.
We did selective hand weeding around the house, and ended up with a nice gravel border with self sown stipa, sisirynchum, sedums and the like popping out of the gravel. Just needed to remove a dandelion every now and then.
The rest was gas gun, starting early in the year and not letting things get too big. Gas guns work best on seedlings. When ours was a second home our first week in the summer was weeding!
Block paving is expensive and done properly costs quite a bit, and doesn’t stop things seeding. Modern geotextiles with mesh formers and gravel is pretty good for weed free drives.
It lessens from the 3rd year of manual weeding - the weeds seem to start giving up. I’ve done 4 years and very little so far this year. If plants can be got earlier in their life, they get the message sooner.
I gather even gas takes at least twice round, probably in more than 1 year, and for what you get the high cost of the gas canisters gives you only a certain satisfaction. But would only save time if lots to do and ideally mostly weeds packed together.
I’ve discussed the gravel previously. Up to Covid we maintained it with hand weeding and some use of the Sheen X300, even with the fact that we did not visit as often as we liked and sometimes large percentages of a visit were taken up weeding we could keep it more or less weed free.
Then came Covid and we were not able to weed for two years
Our gardner kept on top of the tall stuff by driving his tondeuse over the gravel but that just means it is full of grass and low spreading stuff.
I made a small start clearing perhaps 10-15m2 of the path round the house but even that has faltered.
One of the problems is that the gravel was just laid down on sand/the underlying soil so there is nothing to stop weed growth - so now the gravel/sand is just held in a matrix of weed root. Which also means that anything you do to kill the visible part of the plant - flamethrower, pelargonic, even salt, only lasts as long as it takes for the weeds to start growing - usually less than a week.
Given how we managed to keep it clear previously it is actually quite depressing.
It needs digging out, hardcore putting down, a weed control membrane laying and then gravel. It’s on my “To-Do” list post retirement, but by then I’ll probably be too knackered to do it myself.
Yes, and if we were en France en permanence we could probably get back on top of it. It’s too far gone for one visit every 2-3 months.
Quite - I’m already thinking about that. The truth is that it will just run off onto the existing lawn, it might even help reduce flooding in the cellar.
If needed resin bound gravel is supposed to be porous.
My son has a resin bound gravel drive and it is porous Billy, looks nice too.
Exceptionally so, it’s one reason it’s liked around swimming pools and car parks.
Is that so bad? One area we used a lot of clover seed, and abandoned weeding so have (had) a hard clover path that we mowed from time to time. The birds liked it, and seemed ro survive in dry eather too.
Unfortunately it looks terrible
If you’re anything like us, you’ve got better grass on the paths than on the lawns. However, I find the weeds don’t have very deep roots and it’s reasonably easy to pull them up.
However, it’s a full-time job. The paths were beautifully clear when we arrived, but are increasingly a mess after a year. I think any solution, like your resin-bound gravel idea, is going to be better than the status quo.
Update: weed torch is working as intended, and either my inner child or inner rager - or both - enjoy incinerating those weeds and errant grass blades from tight spots. Yes, I suspect I’ll be doing it repetitively, but my front area took 10 minutes and my garden area another 10 to trim up. I’ll channel Linda Hamilton from Terminator and conquer my world!
For those who might prefer a Roundup (glyphosate-free or not) solution, these are in Lidl today. A snip at €49.
