Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm I spend a lot of time trying to talk about good
gardening practices and one of those topics that come to me a fair amount is the uses of common
household vinegar in the garden supposedly for all sorts of uses now horticulturally speaking some of
these uses are a little bit dubious some of them can even do more harm than good so instead of
spouting off again about the 10 miracles of vinegar what i'll go through is i'll go through
10 uses supposedly in the garden for vinegar in this video and i will also rate them give them
a letter grade for their accuracy and usefulness and because i don't want to be tearing something
down without offering an alternative where appropriate i will offer additional alternatives
of things that will be more useful than vinegar for those same situations use number one i'm going
to talk about is using vinegar to adjust down the ph of your soil and i'm going to give this one
a letter grade of "D" because although it's based somewhat in reality or at least in the intuition
that if you add an acidic thing to your soil it will make the soil more acidic
it is really a fundamental misunderstanding about how soil ph is made up soil's made up
of a lot of minerals and some of those minerals can be things like calcium which tend to bring up
the ph or you can also have the availability through a bacterial breakdown of things like
sulfates and phosphates that tend to bring the ph down i'm simplifying it massively here but
the truth is that the addition of of vinegar may momentarily shock down the ph of your soil
may actually have an unwanted effect on the soil life as well because you know bacteria
like things a little bit stable if you bring down their living environment in ph quickly
it may actually kill off some of your beneficial bacteria and then of course once that once that
solution of vinegar has washed through through rainfall or whatever then you end up with the soil
minerals still being exactly the same as when you started so it doesn't successfully
adjust your soil ph over a length of time as for alternatives some people will recommend sulfur or
aluminum sulfate both of those things will adjust down your ph over time so we'll compost although
it's a slower process straight onto use number two and this is the most common i hear recommended
is to use vinegar as a weed killer in the garden that would call for you to place the vinegar
straight up into a container like this and spray it onto weeds around the garden now this has a
tiny bit of merit insofar as vinegar is corrosive and as a corrosive it can damage tissues of plants
especially straight up five percent or in higher concentrations as you can find it sometimes on the
market it can definitely damage those leaf tissues the problem is that it's very ineffective against
tap rooted plants first of all so if you have something that's a creeper a runner or top rooted
you're going to burn those leaves temporarily it will not kill the plant for sure and that doesn't
matter what weather or temperature you apply it in the other thing to say is that even if
you're trying to kill those shallow rooted annual weeds that are young or germinating
you really have to pick a warm day a day like this where it's cloudy a bit cool outside or
rain as expected it just won't work so it's i'm going to give this one a letter grade of "C"
or maybe a "C-" because it's something that can work but it's not as effective
as other things used for the same purpose certainly there are the chemical means which are
far more effective than vinegar but even given if you have a problem with using glyphosate or 2 4-d
for controlling weeds which i don't begrudge you then the other thing that you can use and most
organic growers are moving over to this method is to use flame weeders which are again not
don't chemically affect the soil and they burn the plants and can kill the tap roots as well so that
would be my alternative if you try to want to stay in within the organic realm use number three i'm
going to talk about is using it as an insecticide so often they will talk about putting a vinegar
solution a dilute vinegar solution adding a drop of dish soap as they always do in these recipes
and then spraying that onto insects on your plants here's the problem with this and i'm going to tell
you right up front I'm giving it an "F" because there's just no good scientific basis for what's
the right threshold for applying vinegar to your plants that will kill the insects but not kill the
plant itself one study that i found working on leaf hoppers found that you had to go up to an
acetic acid content of up to 30 percent to kill off the leaf hoppers well at 30 percent that's
uh six times more acidic than the uh household vinegar uh which means that it's going to have
a hell of a big effect on the foliage of your plants so because they haven't found a uh
the right level to apply this at that it could be damaging to the insects but not damaging to
the plants i definitely would not risk using this in my garden use number four similarly it's talked
about using vinegar in a fungicide now this one is i'm going to give it a "D" because there's a
little more basis in science for this one that is when they're trying to do post-harvest treatment
of veggies and they're trying to hold off fungus they will use a mist or an atomization of vinegar
to try to treat it so they don't rot so quickly that being said once again they have not found
the right or done the studies to find the right levels of vinegars that you would apply
to try to harm fungus on plant foliage without without harming the plant itself in this case
there's a little more evidence to back baking soda if you're looking for a home remedy i did
post a recipe for that in my black spot on roses video i'll link that one up above which i have
found to be relatively effective for reducing black spot but not causing harm on my plants
but for the use of vinegar they haven't come to any conclusions about what that level would be
so i would definitely not recommend it at this time use number five i've heard proposed is as an
animal repellent and again this is one of those ones where you would put the vinegar straight
into a sprayer and you would spray it around the margins of your property or around your patio or
deck and try to keep animals away things like deer or rabbits or other troublesome animals
this is a terrible use for vinegar this one doesn't make the grade i'm going to give this one
an "F" straight away first of all it doesn't persist so if you spread your vinegar around the yard
today two hours later three hours later it will have volatilized it'll be gone it won't
be repelling anything even assuming it ever did which i'm a little questionable about
second thing is that spraying vinegar straight onto anything like masonry
plastic metal it's corrosive uh so you're gonna see damage marking etching
on the things that you spray it onto so it's just a really bad idea now on this one i don't have a
great alternative i know that for deer if that's your problem there is a granular repellent on the
market called the plant skid but as for other ones i've heard things for rabbits like a blood meal
there's other ones that i that i heard that you would spread that imitate the urine of predators
you may have to to research these but the truth is i don't have a really good solution animals
getting into your garden and eating the plants is one of the classic problems of of gardeners and i
don't think there is a magic bullet for them to be truthful number six and i couldn't believe my ears
when i saw this one in the videos on youtube about using it to kill slugs and snails
this is akin to throwing salt on slugs and snails as a slow way to pull out their moisture in this
case to dissolve them i think there's probably less inhumane ways to kill your slugs and snails
i'm going to give this one an "F" number seven i've seen it recommended as a way to aid germination
as a dilute vinegar solution soak in seeds before you plant your seeds this one was intriguing to
me because i hadn't heard it before so i wanted to look into it and see what evidence there was
in the end i'm giving it an "F" because the only one study i could find on it they tried it on eggplant
seedlings and they tried a bunch of different uh concentrations of vinegar and basically every
concentration of vinegar slowed down germination so it wasn't it wasn't positive it was towards
the negative and so it goes to show that once you test some of these home remedies in real
world situations or scientifically sometimes they won't hold up on to number eight is to use vinegar
to dissolve calcium in things like eggshells or lime to try to add calcium to cure blossom
and rot that's a mouthful yes the concern is that blossom and rot is a physiological disorder that
happens in your tomatoes or peppers when the en the blossom end of the fruit starts to rot uh
due to a temporary lack of calcium the problem with this and i'm gonna give this one a "C-"
or a "C" it can work if you do dissolve your calcium or eggshells into the vinegar
it does make a water-soluble version of calcium that you can put into the soil the problem with
curing blossom and rot with it is that blossom and rot is like i said a physiological disorder
it's usually more related to an uneven uptake of moisture in your plants so too much water or too
little water or an uneven watering can often do it second thing to say is that calcium availability
in the soil is a very very complicated thing all of you people who are throwing epsom salts into
your gardens indiscriminately should take warning about that because magnesium can interfere with
the uptake of calcium so on this one i would say yes technically you can use the the vinegar to
dissolve a calcium source and add calcium but as for alternatives to it one i would say water
your peppers and tomatoes more regularly as as a first step and if you do find a calcium deficiency
you could try this or you could use something like calcium chloride or calcium nitrate each of which
is inexpensive readily available and fully soluble so you don't have to use vinegar to to dissolve it
number nine is the use of dipping your cuttings like these into vinegar before you stick them to
try to root your plants i don't know what the theory is behind this one i guess you may as
well include apple cider vinegar as a solution for rooting hormone because people use everything for
it people talk about using honey cinnamon bananas aloe vera onions hey why not vinegar except
you know i give it some pause with vinegar because vinegar as we know from previous discussion
is a bit of a corrosive i guess in a mild version you could make the argument that it could work as
a disinfectant i don't know but i couldn't find any studies to support its use and so i'm going
to give this one an "F" as just completely unsupported and finally number 10 is the
recommendation to use vinegar as part of a recipe to build a trap for fungus gnats or fruit flies
and so it usually goes in with a sugar source some vinegar and then there's some sort of an inverted
bottle thing that you use to try to trap your fungus gnats or your fruit flies the problem with
this approach i'm going to give it a "C" because i've seen it work i've seen traps like these
work against fruit flies and fungus gnats the problem is it doesn't break their life cycle
so if you have house plants for instance that have fungus gnats breeding or in your propagation area
have fungus gnats breeding in the soil of your plants that's where they do their most damage
and this trap will do nothing to solve that so i'm going to give it a c because i think
it can work but it really doesn't address your problem your problem is those those larvae of the
fungus gnats that are attacking the roots of your young plants and in that case i've done a video
on fighting fungus gnats i will link that above but the solution on it really is to go for either
something like steiner anemia steiner nema which is a predatory nematode that attacks the uh the
fungus gnat larvae or to go for something like bti which will also as a as a bacteria
will attack those larvae all right thanks so much for watching my video today uh it's a
it's an interesting thing to see what people will do when they see a folk remedy and they
try to apply it to garden situations but you know if you have any questions about that or any other
folk remedies in the garden please drop those below the video and we can talk about it