Solarization

A while back, I wrote about fighting the bermuda and Johnson grass that had invaded our hoop house.  See April 26th & 29th entries.  At that time I was just trying to get the worst of it around the edges and said that I would talk about a way to kill grass and weeds on a larger scale at a later time.

Well, the time has come.   We are using a technique called "solarization".  This is a method that uses the sun's energy to kill weeds. The first step to implement this method is to wet the ground thoroughly.  Next you lay a sheet of clear plastic down over the wet ground.  Note this has to be CLEAR plastic that will allow the sun's rays to go through and heat up the ground underneath.  You should seal the edges down as well as possible to keep the heat under the plastic.  Before long, you will notice beads of water collecting on the underneath side of the plastic.  Basically, what happens here is it gets very hot under the plastic and "steams" the grass and weeds.  This will even kill seeds in the top layer of the soil.  After a few weeks, you have a weed free patch of ground.

Here's a picture of how we are applying this method to the soil inside our hoop house:

This is an old sheet of greenhouse plastic that we took off our little backyard hoop house when we moved.  It was just about the right size to use for this project.