If you have tough weeds in your lawn, plant a thick patch of your favorite grass seeds, and use more sprinkled compost on the lawn for a richer lawn soil. For extra greening use any high protein fertilizer like corn products or fish products, etc. This will increase weed control.

If you have tough weeds in your garden, use more sustainable no-till gardening methods. Constantly mulch everything in the garden! Use thicker natural mulches. Use slightly undone compost if available as a mulch.

Only use a natural herbicide if all the above fail. Citrus tea products (i.e. orange or lemon products) or straight, undiluted, vinegar teas work great.

Hi,

Thanks for the help. :-)

No, it is not a lawn. It is an area that I want to plant shrubs and perennials in and part of it I want to put raised vegetable beds with a mulch around it. If I leave the weed there and try to mulch, my experience has been that it will escape under the edge of the raised bed and come up in the vegetable beds.

What is a vinegar tea?

Adam

What you have sounds like bermuda grass, but I don't know if it lives that far north. It is pretty much impossible to get rid of, even with chemicals.
There've been lots of postings on it in this forum. Try a search.
In the meantime, I'm giving you a link (at the bottom) to help in id'ing it. If you don't have bermuda grass, use this link (http://www.ppws.vt.edu/weedindex.htm) to see an alphabetic listing of grass weeds. Then maybe you can go through them and find what you have.
Good luck to you!

Here is a link that might be useful: Va. Tech Weed ID Guide: Bermuda Grass

Hi Kate,

Thanks for that link. I went there and figured out that what I probably have is quackgrass. It makes it easier to figure out how to handle it.

I did a Google search and found info suggesting that the digging was not a good idea. Which lines up with my experience. I made some further calls today and four options have been suggested to me.

One to use herbicides which I won't do.

Second to solarize that area with black plastic for 3 months. But I don't have full sun and not sure it will heat up enough. It was suggested that I could smother them with the plastic if I leave it on the whole growing season.

Third, that I could try a propane torch and repeatedly burn them, but no one knew how long it would take, if it would work, and of course that is pretty labor intensive.

Fourth, that if I rototill it, it will increase the weed, but the soil is then so lose, that when it starts growing back it is easy to pull it out.

So far the solarizing seems like my best option. I hate to lose a whole season, but I have to do something that will work.

Any other input, or experience with any of these suggestions?

Thanks,
Adam

Try thick layers of cardboard or newspaper, covered with manure or mulch. This works wonders on the worst perennial weeds.

Hi John,

We are definitely going to put down cardboard, but were thinking of trying the plastic over it. I am not sure how thick a layer of mulch I could apply, since this area covers the root zone of 3 large spruces and a London Plane Tree. At least on one side of these trees. I have read that you shouldn't raise the soil level too high or you smother the tree. I guess it is unclear to me what is going to be better for the trees, the mulch or the plastic.

Adam

Nix the plastic...that's definitely a bad idea over root zones.

If you do the paper/cardboard good and thick, that's your weed suppression. The overlay of mulch or compost is mostly just to keep the paper from blowing away and so that you don't have to look at it.

I wrote an article about this recently if you're interested:

http://www.gjohnmcconomy.com/organic/mulch/newspaperandmulch.html

Hi Johnny,

Thanks very much for the article you linked. GREAT article. We have actually used that method a lot in our yard. Every time we don't want to dig up grass. We alter the method a little. Two people, one laying the newspaper and one spraying it gently with a hose set to shower.

We did use the newspaper with plastic for an area that was bordering our house and it did a great job, we didn't have anything grow up through the mulch for 4 years. But there wasn't a root zone of any trees or shrubs there. We always mulch all our beds using the method you describe, but have changed over to cardboard. We find it faster, easier and heavier for weeds to poke through. I see the earth worms love it too.

I just didn't think this method would work on the perennial weeds. So we will forget about the plastic as I certainly don't want to harm the trees, and will mulch with cardboard and bark mulch and just leave it for a year. We have lots of containers and will manage it that way for this year.

Thanks very much to all who offered advice, you helped me decide what to do.
:-)
Adam

I used newspaper and mulch to supress and hopefully kill a teaberry vine that my ex-husbands grandmother planted and the family has tried every possible way to kill since. Established in 1918 the plant is probably resistant to nuke, roundup, every possible farm weed killer including straight deisel and soil sterilant. 1 inch of newspapers and 1 inch hot turkey manure on top, and I left it there for 3 seasons. If it didnt kill the plant itself, it did make a barrier that the plant could not reach across. It did not hurt the neighboring blue spruce nor the white lilac tree.

The teaberry did not become sucessful at tearing the south wall from the rest of the house , recracking a 2 foot foundation, or taking down a 6 foot cedar post and slat fence. It killed the orchard grass too which is what your grass sounds like. I did a 4 foot swatch against the fence and slept the deep sleep of one that has made an organic method work when nothing else has.

My grandfather used a similar method to kill prickley pear cactus in his pastures when I was a kid, going back to when he was a kid. He used pig manure and old rugs or carpet. He liked the orchard grass because it was better than anything else. In his day carpets were wool and burlap, both natural fibers.

Kestie,

Thanks so much for sharing that story. We got the cardboard and bark mulch layed down this weekend, and am happy to have that resolved. We ran out of cardboard and still have some more that we want to do around the edges but almost there. Hope I don't have to wait 3 seasons. [g]
It was hard to decide to leave that area to sit for a year, let alone 3..lol...but now that the decision has been made and I feel real hopeful that the problem will be resolved once and for all, I am starting to figure out it won't be so bad. I am finding places for the plants I was going to put there and planning on using some of our containers on it.

I suppose old rugs would do the trick. Guess it wouldn't be such a good idea with the rugs that are available now.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

:-)
Adam

Adam, RootDiggerNC posted this great link on the Carolinas forum. Thought you might be interested to know there is a good use for quack grass!
I tried to post this last night, but for some reason it didn't take.
(This comes from the site about repelling slugs. There's more at the link below.)
"Quack Grass: Quack Grass damages the nerves slugs use for feeding. Chop it up and use it as a mulch. Make a tea by cutting it up, soak in 1 quart of warm water for 24 hours, then use as a barrier spray on soil. Don't spray directly on plants. The use of Quack Grass has, personally, worked very well for us. See more on using Quack Grass for recipes."
K.

Here is a link that might be useful: Ugh, slugs!

Thanks for the tip carolinakate! I happy to know there is some use for quack grass. I dig it up as I see it. Once a neglected bed became infested with quack grass. I had to dig up the whole bed,and all of the perennials there to get it out.

I have problems with bermuda grass, Althea, but can't bring myself to take everything out (yet) to get rid of it.
K.