I inherited this smallish (10×15) patio and am wondering if there’s anything easy or low maintenance I can do to clean it up and keep it weed free (if that’s even a thing). Open to any and all suggestions.
Am in Toronto, Canada for what that’s worth.
Thanks for looking!
by camfrye1
18 Comments
Put a bunch of poison on the plants
Light it on fire…lol
You can tarp it for a year and let everything die. You can use pesticides to kill it. You can scorch it. You can dig it out.
Once it’s gone you can plant low maintenance moss and hope it outcompetes the weeds. You can use tech sand and fill the voids. You can use concrete to fill the voids. You can rip up all the pavers and lay weed fabric and use sand to fill the voids.
You have tons of options depending on what your desired outcome, effort and budget is. Depending on what you do, the weeds will either never come back or will need to be dealt with every season.
There are a few methods to kill the weedy grass as others have mentioned but long term you should look at low growing plants that fill in between pavers so weeds are less likely to take hold.
Think creeping thyme, Corsican mint, scotch/irish moss
DIY Vinegar spray, DIY Salt solution, solarize it, or use a torch ( my favorite)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a1xkX6YOYtk
✅ Pull the weeds from the base, exposing the roots, and pour boiling hot water from a kettle. It will soak in and cook everything.
In Toronto …
Do not try to grout if use cement between the stones. It will be a crumbly mess in a couple of years. Cemented stone patios need special construction.
Dig out a couple of inches between the stones and:
* wedge smaller rocks in the cracks to minimize the area for weeds to grow, then sweep sand into the remaining spaces.
* Fill with “polymer sand”
* Fill with crushed granite or other irregular rock and tamp it down., Do NOT use pea gravel because it doesn’t stay in place.
I would scoop out the grass/weeds and an inch down into the soil around all the stones and then seed with something low growing and hardy like creeping thyme (or get mature plants, separate into chunks and let them slowly fill out the grooves). If you take out that inch of soil and choose something that only gets 1-3″ it’ll grow in at the same height as the stones and never really need trimming. I did it with my stone path this year and had great success until a skunk dug it all up the night before a heatwave lol
You could plant something hardy to crowd out the weeds and have a consistent look. I just imagine creeping flox in all those cracks so that in the spring you have solid pink lines everywhere
Only way to get it weed free would be to completely seal it, and reseal it every year. Which would be pretty stupid.
Boiling water. You will have to repeat unless you replace the dirt.
Scrape it off and put a local moss in its place.
I put creeping thyme on mine
Tarp over winter. Seed with low growing clover in spring. May take a few seasons.
I built a similar-looking patio. Underneath is a French drain. The purpose was to allow water to drain while knowing that I would need to pull weeds. My point is that you should consider your drainage situation and what might be underneath these beautiful stones.
Those are big gaps. I would lean into it and after killing off vegetation with boiling water, I’d plant creeping thyme or something similar.
I replaced mine with a concrete base and flagstones set in them. This is the before. It was constant dirty, coming loose, bits of dirt washing away, weeds, etc. It is pretty cleaner than average here.
https://preview.redd.it/3ltvwabebs8f1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0513b681a08e5c4314f4de41c6c5ad0b62cbdb80
How many times do we have to say FIRE