Some time ago, I bought some vinegar based weed killer that also had a small amount of clove oil as an ingredient. It seemed to work pretty well but was a bit expensive, so I went back to just using vinegar. Then I came across a way of turning cloves and vinegar into an anti-mould spray, without needing to buy clove oil. I thought I would check out and see if the addition of clove oil through the cloves enhanced the vinegar as a weed killer. This, is my story!
To be fair, the cloves I used were bought an indeterminate amount of time ago, but have been stored in a sealed jar ever since. They still smell strongly of cloves.
To make the mould killer, the instructions were put half a cup of cloves into a blender with 300ml of white vinegar, and whiz it up. Then filter the resulting sludge through a coffee filter and dilute the filtrate with cleaning vinegar at a ratio of one part filtrate to four parts cleaning vinegar. The resulting brew still smelled pretty strongly of cloves and although I have no way of knowing the amount of clove oil in the final mix, it did smell somewhat similar to the commercial stuff I bought.
But how did it work?
To test things out I had a small area about 600mm x 600mm, with a concrete border just outside the greenhouse, it was filled with crushed terracotta but had been grown through with weeds. I divided it in half with a piece of wood, the intention being to spray each side, one with vinegar and the other with the vinegar and clove oil mix. I would then leave them and monitor over time to see if there was any difference in performance.
I used a spray bottle to apply 23 grams of weedicide to each side, and used a small sheet of plywood between the two sides to prevent overspray form either side affecting the outcome. I then kept an eye on the area to see if there was much difference between the sides. We did get a bit of rainfall a few days later, but not much.
So after keeping watch for several weeks to see what differences there were, the answer was – no significant differences. Which I have to say was disappointing!
Perhaps upping the amount of the clove extract, or maybe different weeds, or applying a greater amount of the weed killer would reveal a difference, I don’t know. I guess in the meantime I’ll go back to killing mould!
