One of the biggest frustrations in a garden is how fast grass can invade and take over.  This is especially true in a new garden when you have just tilled the existing grass under and planted on top of it.  The grass comes back with a vengeance.  Saving your garden requires a lot of work, but can be done.

Grasses have hollow, segmented stems.  They range from bamboo, which can grow several inches a day in good conditions, to Bermuda, which is usually the offender in our vegetable gardens.  In any case, there are several ways to get rid of the grass. 

Pull It Up

The first one, pull up every piece, roots and all, is very labor-intensive and almost impossible to achieve.  It is, however, organic and works if you really do get all the grass pulled up.

Solar Sterilization

The second method is to put clear plastic over the ground and weigh the edges down with rocks or something heavy.  Leave the plastic down for a month or two to bake all the weeds from the heat of the sun.  This works best during the summer.  Doing it in August in Texas will cook anything.  This method is also organic.  The downside is you have to leave the garden fallow for a month or two in order to cook all the weed seeds laying there.

Double Digging 

This is a very labor-intensive process but makes a great garden.  You mark the plot you want.  Take a sharpshooter shovel and dig one shovel width across and one shovel length deep.  Put the grass and dirt in a wheelbarrow.  Move over one shovel length and do it again.  Instead of putting the grass and soil in the wheelbarrow, put it in the trench you just dug, grass side down.  Repeat across the entire plot of land.  In the last row, but the grass and dirt from the wheelbarrow grass side down.

Herbicide

Another method is to use a herbicide.  Some people do not use herbicides because they believe they damage the environment or make people sick.  If you want a quick kill, however, herbicides will do that.  The standby herbicide is Glyphosate, sold as Roundup™.  It kills weeds and grass.  The downside is it kills vegetable plants, too.  That means you either have to use it before planting, to kill out the existing grass, or use it very carefully by just treating the grass.  This is very labor-intensive.

Glyphosate

Be careful using any herbicide or pesticide.  To use glyphosate to kill grass, you must wait until the soil temperature is at least 60-65 degrees.  Then you spray the grass to wet it.  The grass absorbs the poison and transfers it to the roots.  The poison kills the roots.  This takes about two weeks.  For very thick grass, you may have to apply a second spray at this time to kill anything the first spray didn’t get.  At this point, you can till the dead grass under and use it as organic matter to help the soil.

Grass is hard to control in a garden.  Any way you go about it is labor-intensive and not much fun.  However, once your patch is truly grass-free, you will have a much easier time keeping weeds from coming back and smothering your vegetable plants.

Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden. 

In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.