How to Get Rid of Bermuda Grass

Ah yes, bermuda grass, gardeners' bane, the devil's own anti-victory-garden weed.

Most often you will hear of mulching as a solution to control weeds, but ha! Bermuda grass laughs at your mulch.

Mulch keeps the soil nice and moist for it, and it just pushes right up through the mulch to the fresh air and sunshine above. Yes, mulch, it just helps your bermuda grass grow, and then makes it harder to dig out. Mulch might work if the area was already totally cleared of the bermuda grass, but if you already have no bermuda grass, you don't need this guide, now do you?

For those of us battling the evil scourge, here is how you do it, the number one best anti-bermuda grass method.

It all starts with tilling the soil. If you aren't tilling the grassy area, you are already a step behind. As an Arizona gardener, tilling is not just a way to loosen the soil, oh no, it is far more. For us, tilling is a preemptive offensive strike, the necessary first step in battling a vicious enemy!



You see, bermuda grass is like an iceberg, 9/10 of it underground. If you aren't striking at the roots, you are wasting your time. It would be like trying to cut off the top of the ice berg. Sure, you can whack the top, but more of it would immediately pop right up. Same with bermuda grass.

Shovel-loosening the earth is not good enough. Sure it will loosen the soil. The bermuda grass roots will thank you for the nice loose earth, in fact. If you only have a shovel, you absolutely must run your hands through the loose soil, inch by inch, and remove any and all bermuda roots you find.

The real trick is to shred, utterly decimate and dice, its root structure. Of course, that is just the opening salvo. It will slow it down a little bit, like Wolverine getting shot in the head, but it will come back. But shredding the roots with a deep tilling is a great start, and will set its growth cycle back for a few weeks or longer, a very nice start.

Now, your soil is rich and loose, and your favorite little seedlings are working their happy way up to the sun, stretching their cute stems and precious leaves up to the bright clear sky, when BOOM it happens. Thick, nasty, mean-looking bermuda shoots come up right next to it! You try to pluck it out, but the green part just snaps off in your fingers at ground level. Like a salamander loosing its tail, the main body of grass lies safely underground, snickering at your pathetic attempts to dislodge it. Tomorrow it is back with more shoots, brazenly asserting its dominance of your gardend space. Time, it knows, is on its slide, and it knows you dare not re-dig now, lest you kill your tender young friendly seedlings with your clumsy spade work. It is a nasty nightmare scenario faced by every Arizona victory gardener... You cuss, and sweat, and loath, and fear.... But what can you do?

Put that spade away, friend, there is a better way! For, if you have taken my good advice so far, the soil is nice and loose from your tilling. Now, it won't look like it, this is Arizona afterall, so what you see on top is probably more like hardpan, but trust in your work, friend. Under the top crust, the soil is loose. The key decision comes now. If you attempt to "weed" with the top all crusty like that, the top of the grass will just rip off from the hardpan. Instead, relax, and irrigate. Yup, that's right, just water, nice and high, let that aich too oh just pile up, and sink in nice and deep. Take a few minutes, crack a beer open, and savor your coming victory, for the moment of triumph is at hand.

Now, you can't rush it, you have to let the water sink in, and soften up the top crust back to its gently muddy and silty condition. Then, when the soil is all muddy and soft, irrigate again, covering the garden with anothe inch of water.

Then, and only then, reach down and start your weeding. Grip the grass a bit below the soil level, down where it is white not green, and shake it a little as you slowly pull it. The deeper you grab it, the better, and since the mud is so soft, you can dig your fingers in real easy a inch down if you need.

The bermuda grass, so tough and nasty beforehand, is now as pliant and gentle as a babe. It will rise up out of the mud with no effort at all, hardly even disturbing the soil. Long inches of the white roots will slide right out, and you can pat the mud right back down to fill any hole it leaves.

Your precious seedlings a mere inch away will probably not even notice. You are probably just pulling out short strands at this time, not any big root bunches, because the previous tilling shredded it up so well. If you didn't till, the big root bunches will still be intact, and their removal will disturb the soil much more. But if you previously tilled properly, the strands will come right out, smooth as silk.

It works best when you do it in standing water, not just mud. The standing water lubricates the roots as they are pulled out, letting you get real long ones. Pulling them out from soft mud without standing water will work, but not as well, as more of them will break off in the ground. Plus, the standing water keeps your hands from getting too muddy, which can be a real problem as our Arizona clay clumps up in big chunks on your hands and fingers.

Here I am digging my fingers in to get ahold of the roots:



Check out the length of that root I just pulled out:
(Click on pic for closeup)

Well, that about encapsulates my method. 1- Till, good and deep to shred the roots. 2- Irrigate. 3- Weed only in soft mud, with standing water.

Pretty simple, but pretty darn effective. Pulling the root out smoothly without breaking it will eliminate bermuda from your garden forever. Let me know if you try it, and how it works for you.

Dealing with Weeds and Grass

Everything got massive this week. The spring heat, I guess. The radishes, the lettuce, the peas, the weeds, everything! It like doubled in size overnight. Crazy.

I am harvesting the weeds for my compost pile. I am also letting it grow, a natural green manure crop to be tilled under in a couple weeks.




It'd be cool to identify these little buggers. They look like nasturtium leaves, except with ragged leaf edges instead of the nice round ones of the nasturtium.

The bermuda grass, now that is another story. That stuff will take over your area, any area that is watered, in summer. Years ago I used them to my advantage, keeping tomotoes going through August by letting them become a ground cover to keep the garden floor cool and moist as I irrigated every day. The downside is, all that work you did is totally undone, as grass has totally colonized your garden again. I am a big fan of bermuda grass for a lawn, but it is tough to garden with that stuff around.

This year, I am just tilling it under. I am doing an experiment to see how well that works. In a couple beds, I am just tilling, but in a couple others, I am tilling then running through the loose soil by hand to remove as many of the cut-up roots as possible. I honestly don't know how much of it will survive the tilling process. I'd love to say, none of it, but more like, all of it.

That stuff is tough, and the underground root structure is incredible (as you can see in the picture). You could look at a bare patch of dirt and think you were clear, but underneath, its all grass roots, just waiting for a drop of moisture. Luckily, it doesn't go much deeper than 4-6 inches, so a tiller is enough to thoroughly shread the root structure.



When getting rid of it by shovel, here is a nice trick: Get the spade under the roots, then just dump it upside down on the ground. Don't try to remove the roots from the dirt right away, the moist soil just clumps around the roots. Wait a day, till it has dried a bit, then step on the clumps. The soil just falls away, leaving the big nasty roots sitting there on top. I gather them up and burn them at that point. Mwah ha ha, revenge at last!