Killing Weeds

My daughter is a big agriculture person. She wants to be an agricultural engineer when she grows up, she's an officer in the Future Farmers of America, and she loves playing in the dirt. She's all about agriculture, until it's time to deal with our yard on a sunny, South Georgia day. Anyone who has lived in South Georgia knows that by 10 am the tempereature is well above 90 in the shade. I tried to get our agriculture princess up early this morning, before the heat hit hard.  She is spending the summer working on an SAE project which includes lawn maintaince, landscaping, and various other home garden things. I tried getting her up at 8am so, she could pull weeds and trim bushes, but in typical teen fashion she ignored all calls to get up and get going. By 9 am, when she finally rolled out of the bed, put on her boots, FFA shirt, shorts and gloves (DON'T GET ME STARTED ON THE BOOTS AND SHORTS THING), the temperature was 86 outside and whatever shade was available in her assigned work areas had long since disappeared.

Today's chief mission was to trim bushes and weed. My agriculture princess and I both take great joy in killing weeds, but neither one of us has a great deal of patience for waiting on chemicals to kill things.  Usually we just pick them out of the ground and throw them in the burn pit, but the soil is stating to get hard and the weeds are starting to get hardy. We went to Pintrest to see about a natural weed killer because the commercial stuff is expensive. There are also a lot of safety precautions you're supposed to use when dealing with the commercial stuff, and since the agriculture princess has to document her yard dealings for her summer project, we decided trying an all natural method instead. Of course now all you smell is vinegar and dish detergent outside, but by this evening when it cools down the weeds should magically be dead due to a chemical reaction and South Georgia heat.  I personally don't believe this to be true, but the agriculture princess is willing to wait and try tonight.

My Agriculture Princess with her natural weed killer!