When I first decided to use Sahara I had trouble finding advice from people who have actually used it. Most people on these forums like to give their opinions about the do's and don'ts of pesticide/herbicide use without offering any actual experience with them.

Over a three year period I conducted my own experiment with Sahara and offer it here for anyone who might be contemplating it's use.

Sahara is meant to kill out all stuff and keep the ground completely dead for many, many months. Use it in parking lots or driveways where you don't want a single plant to grow....ever! But I wanted to know how close you can get to plantings without damaging the desireables. I wanted to know if it could be used down fencelines to stop the creep of weeds and around flower bed perimeters as an edging to keep them nice and tidy.

I used a pump sprayer and sprayed a swath down my fence lines. Terrific stuff for this job! It seemed to kill everything about 6 inches on all sides of the actual spray pattern. (I very lightly sprayed, almost feather-like on bare-ish weedy ground, aiming the spray directly on the fence line.) For 3 years now, weeds have not filled in and has saved me from weed-eating chores immensely.

Emboldened by this success I tried the flower bed edging idea....and now very much wish I hadn't. It doesn't work for this purpose at all. Yes, it kills the grass from creeping into the beds, but the product moves through damp soil much differently than through dry soil. In some spots the dead area is a few inches wide, some spots are over a foot wide even though I was very gentle with the sprayer nozzle and tried to apply very sparsely and very consistently. Many of my flower bed plantings are now growing sickly....specifically the perennials. Annuals, on the other hand, seem to be doing fine right up to the dead-zone, but perennials (up to 10 feet away) are waning. My bad decision to use this stuff as an edger has so far cost me a mature apple tree, several younger fruit trees, including a much beloved nectarine and apricot, a perfect specimen of a 15' dogwood and many roses and shrubs. Violas, pansies, petunias, weeds, grasses seem to be doing just fine in the exact same ground.

My theory: Sahara travels well through moist soil and gravity automatically takes it downward. Any plants that have roots that grow down more than a few inches have a better chance of sipping the chemical up into their foliage...thus killing it. Plants with small root systems do not seem to be affected by the product as much.

Lesson: I will continue to keep Sahara on my shelf to use down the pasture fencelines, the driveway and patio....but I will sure never use it in my yard again.