Grass/weed control

[Hinotori]

I have a problem here with weeds being hard to control. Mostly it's grass. It's very hard to remove from potted plants even when young. There is just so much of it. I can't mulch the pots deep enough to stop the grass.

I'm looking for any ideas to help that isn't the hour a day weeding pots I currently have.

I mow to 200+ feet out from the house. Grass seed just seems to materialize and sprout. There is the marsh that has all the different grasses which is where I'm assuming it comes from. Once the rain starts again in September, the gravel driveway always looks like someone heavily seeded it for lawn.

The garden is getting heavy straw this year so Im not worried about it. I learned my lesson there on attempting landscape fabric. Removing all the grass through it sucks.

 

[flowerbug]

it sounds like an annual that seeds easily and heavily and perhaps also very quickly. we have some like that here and the only way i keep it under control is frequent scraping with a stirrup hoe to prevent it from going to seed. if it has gone to seed i have to pull a small amount of it and i toss it in a weed bucket and that gets dumped on the weed pile. the birds pick through that for any seeds or bugs and eventually the roots and dirt all crumble and break down and become worm food. since i am filling in a low spot i never have removed the dirt left over from this break down to reuse in a garden. if i were to do so i would bury it deeply so that any remaining seeds would not be disturbed if i could help it. i don't till so there isn't a chance of me mixing this type of material into a garden's soil. eventually i do redig some areas and that can do some mixing, but since i don't often do this for a whole garden it isn't a huge issue.

for larger amounts i have once in a while contended with, what i've done is pulled it and put it in a bucket and then fed it to my worm farm here inside my room. by spring the worms have taken care of it. what the worms have chewed up is used as my fertilizer in the gardens and it too is buried where it won't likely be disturbed again for the whole season.

that isn't to say that the wind, water, rains, birds and other animals won't move seeds around so i do find grass trying to come up in the gardens, but i scrape them fairly regularly so it isn't often they get a chance to go to seed.

that all said. my favorite material to use to suppress weeds is cardboard. several layers of it with the seams overlapping by six to nine inches.

with a really large area to get back under control i'd always work in sections and make sure there is some kind of barrier so that your hard work gained isn't lost.

herbicides and pre-emergent chemical treatments may not be things i'd want to really use. instead what i would do is scrape off the top layer of potting soil and grass and replace that with fresh potting soil and then cover it with a mulch to prevent easy germination of any seeds that may remain or have a way of coming back into that pot.

in a garden that gets taken over by weeds and i know a lot of seeds are in the top layer of soil i dig a deep hole and strip the surface layer of surrounding soil and weeds into that hole and bury it. if there are roots i'm worried about coming back up i put cardboard and/or newspaper layers over it before burying it. deeply. enough that any subsequent gardening won't disturb that area again for several years. this works very well. you can see an example of this on the web page:

North Garden | Anthive

If I only had a fence...

www.anthive.com

good luck!

p.s. good edges are really helpful (to prevent seed migration but also to keep lawnmower spray or other similar types of issues).

 

[FarmerJamie]

@Hinotori i am lazy when it comes to this stuff. Lol. I need to find my Baker Green Gardening book.

Something like this should work on the drive, if you are careful in application, it works just fine elsewhere

How to Permanently Kill Grass and Weeds with Salt, Vinegar and Dawn

Learn how to permanently kill grass, weeds and unwanted vegetation with these tips and a recipe for homemade non-toxic round up.

www.craftylittlegnome.com

 

[Britesea]

I haven't found that using Epsom Salts kills the weeds permanently; it's actually a fertilizer. For a driveway or someplace I could control runoff- I would use vinegar, Dawn, and sodium chloride for a permanent kill (it worked for Troy, didn't it?)

 

[CrealCritter]

salt works well

 

[Hinotori]

I use vinegar or boiling water on the cement pavers out the back door.

We don't care so much about the drive as it's just a fact of life here. We haven't regravelled because it's firm. Down by the gate will be getting gravel this year because of morons who turn around in it and spin their tires. Driveway is about 300' x 20'. So yeah, don't care about that losing battle.

The grass is just so annoying when it gets in the herbs. I'm repotting mints while they are dormant just so I can get rid of some.

 

[Chic Rustler]

grass is my biggest enemy here. sometimes I win, most of the time i lose.

 

[tortoise]

Is windblown seed the problem? I'm curious if corn gluten meal would help? I've never used it but maybe this year. I got perennial weeds down in my garden but the annuals take over so fast

 

[baymule]

What about a chicken tractor and let the chickens leave it barren?

 

[Hinotori]

Is windblown seed the problem? I'm curious if corn gluten meal would help? I've never used it but maybe this year. I got perennial weeds down in my garden but the annuals take over so fast

Probably windblown. I totally forgot about corn gluten meal. That actually might be a very good candidate for the herb pots. I will be trying that.