What is the use of vinegar and tea in cleaning?

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I haven't seen higher strengths in our stores.
I have seen pickling vinegar, seasonally. I only recently came across 12% cleaning vinegar. Also, a lot of cider vinegar doesn't list the acid percentage, so it shouldn't be used for canning. My rice wine vinegar is 4.5%.
 
@Marlingardener I have some of that 20% acetic acid, to kill weeds with - with some it takes a couple applications, for some very stubborn weeds, but at least it is considered "organic", and doesn't have those residues. 10% works on most, but there are those that don't even blink, when I use that!

I can't stand that smell of vinegar in my house, so I can't imagine cleaning with it! I try to do the pickling outside, if I can, for that reason, though I don't always get that option.
Organic doesn't necessarily mean safe.
 
As GotGarlic said, organic doesn't necessarily mean safe. But the horticultural vinegar leaves no residue in the soil, and is not toxic to pets or pollinators, as some weed killers are.
We get ours from a local nursery, who orders it for us. They are on our Christmas cookie list!
 
Just wanted to mention, for people who don't know, the white distilled vinegar available in grocery stores is diluted with water to 5 percent. If it was 100 percent, it would be very dangerous to use or inhale.
I guess thats why I use the vinegar straight from the bottle. No diluting is what I mean.
Occasionally our dishwasher gets a strange smell to it ( almost smells like water from a fish tank). Anyway, we were told to run it with white distilled vinegar to take away that smell. We did it, it worked perfectly, so now we do it on a semi regular basis. My wife also cleans her coffee maker with it.
My aquariums have no smell. Bad or good. Any odors are a sign of trouble. I make certain I change 50% of the water in each tank per week. Vacuum the substrate and build a vigorous bacteria colony in the filters.
Not that I would do it but You could drink it safely.
 
As GotGarlic said, organic doesn't necessarily mean safe. But the horticultural vinegar leaves no residue in the soil, and is not toxic to pets or pollinators, as some weed killers are.
We get ours from a local nursery, who orders it for us. They are on our Christmas cookie list!
It's toxic to insects and microbes in the soil. In fact, it essentially sterilizes the soil, making it impossible for anything to grow there. It can also be dangerous, if not poisonous, to pollinators and pets, as well as people, since the strong acid can burn skin and damage eyes.

For more information, https://extension.umd.edu/resource/vinegar-alternative-glyphosate
 
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It's toxic to insects and microbes in the soil. In fact, it essentially sterilizes the soil, making it impossible for anything to grow there. It can also be dangerous, if not poisonous, to pollinators and pets, as well as people, since the strong acid can burn skin and damage eyes.

For more information, https://extension.umd.edu/resource/vinegar-alternative-glyphosate
Interesting article. I was considering using it in cracks in the concrete walkway that goes past our house. It wouldn't really matter if it sterilized the soil, since it's not soil so much as accumulated dirt that the weeds grow in. But, it doesn't work well on stuff with tap roots, like dandelion. I guess I'll just keep yanking those out.

Do you, or anyone else for that matter, happen to know what "gpa" stands for? It's obviously an abbreviation for some sort of unit of how much of something per some unit of area. I couldn't find it in a 'net search. Here's where I find the abbreviation used,
Larger weeds (with >3-4 leaves) are likely to survive treatment, but using higher (20%) concentrations (5) of acetic acid and increasing the application volume (from 20 to 100 gpa) can improve weed control (6,7).
I just figured it out. It's gallons per acre. I'm just not used to thinking in US measure other than a bit for cups, quarts, fluid ounces, and tablespoons, and teaspoons.
 
When I use vinegar as a weed killer, I don't use it as a cover-all spray, like commercial growers do with weed killers - just a spot spray, on certain weeds, that pulling doesn't help much with. And I never have a problem with pollinators, or worms or other insects in the soil.

I found it amusing that that article compared the cost of glyphosate and the optional alternatives by "cost per mile", and of course, the glyphosate is much cheaper, thus still used all over, despite all the lawsuits, and that Bayer says they are taking it off the market (but that will only be the retail market). And they had the lists of pros and cons of the vinegar, the pros in a column with very small letters, and the cons in the column with regular size letters. I wonder who sponsored that article?
 
When I use vinegar as a weed killer, I don't use it as a cover-all spray, like commercial growers do with weed killers - just a spot spray, on certain weeds, that pulling doesn't help much with. And I never have a problem with pollinators, or worms or other insects in the soil.

I found it amusing that that article compared the cost of glyphosate and the optional alternatives by "cost per mile", and of course, the glyphosate is much cheaper, thus still used all over, despite all the lawsuits, and that Bayer says they are taking it off the market (but that will only be the retail market). And they had the lists of pros and cons of the vinegar, the pros in a column with very small letters, and the cons in the column with regular size letters. I wonder who sponsored that article?
Glyphosate is used primarily by farmers for commercial crops (not vegetables), so the article was geared primarily for them. I shared it for the information about horticultural vinegar. While you may be knowledgeable about how to use it properly, not everyone is. Many people think that because it has the same name as a substance they use regularly that it's not harmful, but it can be dangerous.

Juries are not good evaluators of environmental science and are easily persuaded by emotional stories, so I wouldn't put a lot of faith in their verdicts on this. It's widely used by farmers not just because it's inexpensive but because it's the most effective way to deal with the problems they're facing. It's a whole lot easier to manage weeds in a single yard than hundreds of acres of farmland.

Regarding the list of pros and cons, there must be some sort of browser glitch going on because they're the same size in mine.

The article was "sponsored" by the USDA through the Cooperative Extension Service. If you want more information about the science of glyphosate, here's a nicely organized set of articles written by a Swedish cell biologist. It starts with this: "The basics:G lyphosate is a modified glycine-molecule (the smallest of our essential amino acids) which has a phosphoric acid (or to be exact, phosphonomethyl) group attached at the end (GLYcine PHOSphonATE). You can find out more about the specifics here. This small molecule binds to an enzyme in plants and many bacteria, which they need in order to synthesise a class of amino acids (aromatic ones). If the plants cannot synthesise these amino acids, after a number of days they will die. Animals do not have this enzyme. Instead, we rely entirely on our diet to provide us with these aromatic amino acids (Trypthophan and Phenylalanine – and Tyrosine, also an aromatic, can be synthesized from Phenylalanine), which means that the inhibitory effect of glyphosate has no direct target in our cells."

17 Questions About Glyphosate
 
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