Devil Grass

Since we don't use herbicides to kill the grass and weeds in our gardens, we have to resort to other means to control weeds.  I do a lot of weeding by hand in the raised beds and cold frames.  These are relatively small areas and it is easy to pull up grass and weeds while I am harvesting.  As long as this is done every few days you can stay ahead of the weeds.  A little bit of time every few days can save major problems later on. 

In larger areas, we use mulches.  Tom picks up bags of leaves that people set out for the trash in the fall.  He used a bunch of these to mulch our potatoes last week.  We also buy wheat straw and use it for mulch.  The problem with that is that it usually has a lot of seed in it and we have volunteer wheat coming up everywhere.

Mulches work very well to eliminate most kinds of weeds.  The 2 exceptions are Bermuda grass and Johnson grass.  I've learned over the years that mulch will help smother the Bermuda grass and if you just keep at it and pull up the blades that come up through the mulch, then you will eventually win the battle.  But, I've never had to deal with Johnson grass until this year, and I've decided this is truly the Devil's grass!! 

Last year during the melee that ensued after we moved out here to the farm, our hoop house was totally neglected!  I knew we had Bermuda grass and Johnson grass that had crept in under the sides and gotten a toe-hold in there.  But, I tried not to think about it and determined that I would deal with it this spring.  Tom is busy with other aspects of the farm and isn't really very good at keeping the weeds under control unless he can till them under with tractor or some other piece of equipment!

Once we get the hoop house cleared out for the summer, I plan to kill most of the grass in there using solarization, a technique that I'll discuss in a future blog entry.  But I still need to manually dig out the grass around the edges and so this weekend I decided I'd spend some time doing just that.  And, that is when I encountered my first Johnson grass.  This stuff is like Bermuda grass on steroids.  

To illustrate how awful it is, I took pictures of some of it.  Pictured below are some runners (above the yard stick) and a piece of root (below the yard stick).  Notice the runners are over a yard long and the root is between 12 and 18 inches.

Not only do the roots go down into the soil a foot or more, they are huge!  The one below is at lease half an inch in diameter.

The grass itself can get 5-6 feet tall.  Stay tuned for updates on my battle with the Devil Grass!