A by-product of corn wet milling is cornmeal gluten. This is a feed for dogs, poultry, fish and cattle.
It is also a natural alternative for conventional chemical laden herbicides.
You can use cornmeal as an effective herbicide to kill weeds, without any threat to the ecosystem and your health. It is a viable and safe alternative especially if you have pets and kids.
Researchers from Iowa State University discovered in their studies that cornmeal preventing the seeds of weeds from germinating such as grass, chickweed, crabgrass and dandelions.
Cornmeal will not kill annual weeds that are growing like:
- Crabgrass
- Foxtail
- Pigweed
- Purslane
It will also not kill perennial weeds which have their roots already established such as:
- Grass plantain
- Dandelions
- Quack
Cornmeal will instead attack their seeds and prevent them from germinating and sprouting new weeds.
Learn How You Can Use Cornmeal In Your Garden
Use cornmeal to reduce the weeds in your garden to preventing their seeds from germinating whole not affecting other vegetation like shrubs, trees and plants.
Follow instructions on the package and ensure that you apply accordingly to reduce the weeds your garden.
The best time to use it is early spring, when applying the cornmeal allow your garden flowers and vegetables to mature a bit before applying it so as not to kill their seeds along with that if weeds.
You Can Also Use Cornmeal To Kill Ants
You can control ants effectively with cornmeal. All you need to do is to pour the cornmeal on ant trails. The ants will carry the cornmeal to their nest to feed, they are unable to digest it and so it will eventually kill them.
Within a week or two the ant population in your home or garden will reduce significantly.
If your garden us pretty large you can use a spray method of application. You can apply every month, during the growing season or after a torrential rainfall to achieve the best results.
Source: Healthy Viral 24
Original article: gardeningknowhow.com
Hey
As you said, cornmeal can be a great weapon to get rid of ants. Although many skeptics say that you cannot kill ants with cornmeal alone. and it must be soaked in boric acid to be effective. But my personal experience,says this is absolutely not true. While the boric acid will speed up the process, it does not have to be added just work.
Jenny
If you have young children or animals don’t use boric acid anywhere they can get it. It’s toxic if ingested by them. If they touch anywhere Boric acid has been applied and then put hands in mouth, not good.
I had no idea cornmeal had so much use for my garden. Thank you!
For ants we used 1 cup of water,, two tablespoons of Boraxo soap, and 1/2 cup of sugar. Mix thoroughly, then put a cotton ball in a pop lid or small lid. Saturate it really good even to over flowing. If it gets on the cabinet leave it there. It will attract the ants even better, because of the sugar. We did this one morning before we left for church. Came home and ants were everywhere around the lid. I immediately wanted to start squashing ants, but it say’s leave them alone. Let them eat, and get as much of the solution on them as they can. They then go back to the hive and the other ants start eating the juice the ants leave as they crawl around in the hive. We left to go for a cook out, and when we got home about three hours or so later, not an ant in site. Still have not had one to this day, and that’s been three months ago. This worked like crazy.
It seems that everything I find regarding cornmeal says it is gluten free. Can you tell me of a specific brand(s) that are NOT gluten free to be used in the garden?
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/corn-gluten-meal-did-not-prevent-weeds-germinating-osu-study