I am slowly trying to remove my front lawn via sheet mulching and I put in some garden beds one month ago. I assumed the Bermuda was growing between the cracks in the cardboard, but after inspecting it the Bermuda grew STRAIGHT THROUGH the cardboard and poked holes in it!? I used standard cardboard boxes with a few inches of mulch on top
Does anyone have any sheet mulching tips when when dealing with Bermuda grass?
by ABeav17
16 Comments
You can throw a second or perhaps third layer of cardboard down before the mulch, if that isn’t too late. Bermuda grass be like that.
Are you against using Preen?
Having similar issues with wood chips although I didn’t have my ducks in a row and made sure I had enough cardboard and just started dumping chips. I’m having this pop through and notice it takes two pulls for it to finally come out whole.
I have been wondering if I should start spraying problem areas with a vinegar water to maybe help prevent it? I don’t really want to do that.
The other option I was thinking about is dumping boiling water.
Mostly commenting to get more ideas from others.
Bermuda grass is forever.
In my experience, you cannot get rid of Bermuda by sheet mulching, it will only make it stronger. I tried for years, eventually I gave up and sprayed it with glyphosate. It took an application in the fall and a follow up application in the spring, but I’m actually Bermuda grass free now. It isn’t like any other grass. I couldn’t even kill it with boiling water.
You are wake up in the middle of the night screaming Bermuda grass 🙂 just nuke it!
Seeing this after I just finished sheet mulching….
Did you cut your grass down as much as possible before laying the cardboard ?
Ugh, same
I love my propane torch. Nothing survives. I feel so powerful!
I hate these fuckers
Jerks!
I got rid of my Bermuda grass and bamboo almost completely when we went low maint because I had a guy with a mini dozer scrape everything out.
Bermuda is crazy, I “naturally” killed mine by tillering several top soil layers. Took forever and even then some minor patches still survived .
FWIW, Charles Dowding — an extremely experienced agriculturist in UK — swears that *any* weed will be eradicated if you stay on top of it and reduce it to soil level with manual removal ASAP/daily. Don’t even bother with the root, he claims, ordinarily it’s not worth the damage to the soil structure to root canal, he says. If you really do stay on top of it, nothing will survive, he says. And maybe that’s true, at my experience level I can’t claim to know that Dowding is wrong, but it is hard to *stay on top of it* like everyday all growing season, unless like Charles this is your profession, then maybe (But even then, you have so many other chores as a farmer!).
He says even field bindweed which he has to battle in his newest field, another plant that is (truly a listed) invasive in many areas that is impervious to sheet mulching, he says it will give up and die if you stay on top of it even without rooting out the roots, just pick off the greens constantly. “Sometimes we give these plants supernatural abilities that aren’t real,” he says. I hope he’s right because I do not want to battle field bindweed my entire life.
I dug below roots I thought- nope! So for just shoots coming up, spray vinegar? Spray focused glycopyrolate? Just pull and commence Operation Bermuda Sisyphus?
I could spend every waking minute weeding Bermuda grass from my yard and it still would be there. The roots go so deep and grow under my driveway/sidewalk so unless I tear up the street it will come back. My only hope is to crowd it out with other plants.
Pull it and get as much root as you can. It’s been such a pain in a few spots of our front yard. We just removed our lawn last year. My experience has been that if you can stay really on top of the weeds for a year, it gets a lot better after that. The thick mulch really helps. Have you watered the cardboard as you’ve laid it and watered the mulch in? That was my method and I feel like it worked pretty well.