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How To Protect Your Driveway From Weeds
A driveway is an often overlooked area of the home, however a clean and tidy driveway can work wonders for the appearance of your property. Like all surfaces, driveways need care and maintenance to ensure they are looking their best. They need comparatively less work than other surfaces, but they can fall victim to the unwanted visitor; weeds.
Not only do weeds make your driveway look unsightly, but they can also cause structural damage to the surface itself. In this blog post, we are going to look at how you can go about preventing and removing these weeds, protecting your driveways quality.
How to Protect Your Driveway From Weeds
The best time to prevent weeds creeping up through cracks, seams and joints in your driveway is by taking preventive measures before you install your driveway. However, if your slate chip driveway, crushed concrete driveway or self binding gravel driveway is already installed, there are still steps you can take to prevent weed growth.
Here are five ways to protect your driveway from weeds.
1. Install weed membrane or a geotextile mesh first
Ideally, you want to be starting your weed prevention efforts before your driveway is installed. For example, if you are installing a paving stone driveway, make sure you will be placing a Geotextile weed Membrane under the slabs. If you are creating a Self-binding gravel driveway you may want to look into driveway weed membrane to help inhibit weed growth in your project.
2. Seal the cracks
If your driveway has already been laid and weeds are coming up through cracks in your concrete driveway or the seams between the slabs, you can prevent future weeds by sealing the cracks. Cement crack filler is an inexpensive option with a squeezy bottle and an applicator tip, enabling you to apply it where it is needed. Other options require a caulking gun and are applied like caulk to fill the cracks.
3. Use Salt
You don’t always need high-strength chemical weed-killer products. Instead, gather up a few household items and you can rid your driveway of any weed growth in no time.
You will need:
A large amount of salt
Dish soap
A water sprayer
Combine the water and salt at a ratio of 1kg of salt per 2 litres of water, adding the soap last to avoid the mixture foaming. Spray it all over the driveway and let it do the work. For larger driveways, using salt water might not be as effective, so consider using large amounts of rock salt and spreading it directly into the surface.
Note: You need to be very careful not to get the salt anywhere near the soil where your desirable plants grow. You also cannot use it in the soil where you might want to grow something in the future. If you are salting driveway cracks or walkway seams, make sure that runoff will not carry the salt to healthy soil.
4. Keep Your Driveway and your gardening tools Clean
Keep your Driveway stones clear of mud and dirt as much as possible. If there is a buildup of mud, then weeds will quickly take advantage of that and start to grow in it. You should also be keeping your gardening tools clean. Make sure to wipe down your weeding tools and other gardening tools after each use as weed seeds are easily transported on garden tools, and you could be unknowingly depositing weed seeds around your driveway.
5. Pull weeds before they go to seed
If you want to prevent future weed growth, it is very important that you pull current weeds before they go to seed. Once your current weeds have seeds, they can quickly spread to other cracks or other parts of your driveway. Be careful when carrying your weeds to the garden bin or compost as the seeds can even be transported and dropped while you are carrying them.
Wanting to spruce up your driveway? At Mainland Aggregates, we stock a wide selection of self binding gravel available in various colours and sizes. This includes the best-selling Cotswold self binding gravel pictured above. We also stock a selection of blended chippings and decorative aggregates which can be used to complete your driveway design. There are countless options to choose from. Call us today on 01234 831 108 for more information.