this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Sorry, I still don't get the part about "salting the earth". Is that something people do to get rid of weeds?
Yep. Did this recently actually lol.
But also commonly known as a war thing, done to render the enemy's land infertile. Can't grow food for a while and stuff.
Neither of these things really make much sense in context, though.
We (in Germany) use salt in winter to defrost the pavement and streets but it doesn't have a big effect on the weeds. They still appear from any crack they can find.
I remember hearing that the Sahara desert was created by Romans salting the earth.
That can't possibly be true?
Also I wonder how it is connected to Jesus saying 'you are the salt of the earth'. That seems like am entirely different thing, but then again maybe not?
I feel like the most modern equivalent is Vietnam.
No, Romans didn't make the Sahara. The myth is usually that they salted the earth when they destroyed Carthage but that isn't true either
Carthago delenda est!
“Salting the Earth” is an idiom that references possibly apocryphal stories of ancient warfare where an invading army would literally put large amounts of salt or salt water in the enemy’s fields so that they wouldn’t be able to grow crops. This was done to make sure that the population couldn’t rebuild and become a threat in the future. Nowadays it is used to mean that someone is making really, really sure that something is destroyed and not coming back.
Edit: Part of the meaning is going out of your way in a big way to do it, because enough salt to actually have an effect, or digging a trench to get the ocean to fill the fields would have been astoundingly expensive.
Yes.
And it's just as bad / good as glyphosate?
No, salt is not toxic. But makes it hard for most things to grow until the sodium washes up.
The handy men did manage to kill one of our roses by salting our sidewalk against weeds.
Salt (sodium) messes with the ability of plants to absorb certain nutrients from the soil, so if that soil wasn't very rich to begin with it can easily starve whatever is nearby.
I personally tried to kill weeds with salt in certain spots of my backyard and failed because it has plenty of nutrients and good drainage, salt doesn't last long after a couple rains.
It also changes the osmolarity of the water in the soil, changing how water can move into their root system.
It's way worse than glyphosate. Nothing grows until it washes up, what can take many years.
Homer Simpson's take on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0BxqHgwlvs