Foodscaping.....Ideas anyone?

[OnionPatch]

I posted last year that my garden was overrun with Bermuda grass. I tried this year to clear it out with normal weed control measures, but no dice.....my garden is buried in three foot Bermuda grass. So I now have an intensive two-year plan to kill it all through drought, deep tilling, solarization and so on. But I can't grow anything in it for a few years while I do this.

So meanwhile, I need to grow veggies somewhere and I decided to try something called Foodscaping. I'll be planting brocolli in my flower bed and lettuce under my rose bushes. I'm going to transplant my asparagus into a flower bed. The foliage will make a pretty backdrop for flowers. Beans, I'll grow on the fence, etc. etc. I wondered what other ideas people might have for this kind of foodscaping. :shrug:

[XemaSab]

1. DON'T DEEP TILL IT!!!!!

Solarize, water, round-up.

Water, dig.

Water, round-up.

Water, dig.

Water, round-up.

Water, dig.

Solarize, water, round-up.

Water, dig.

Water, round-up.

And so forth.

It's going to be a journey. A long, long journey. :cry:

(If you deep-till it, you just cut the stolons, which makes more little Bermuda grasses, and you drive them underground, which makes them harder to dig out. And when you're digging, you have to get EVERY LITTLE PIECE. YES, EVERY SINGLE LITTLE PIECE. :cry:)

[OnionPatch]

4. Thanks for the sympathy. You seem to understand what I'm dealing with.

People keep telling me to use weed-control methods that are used on normal, everyday weeds but they don't understand what I'm dealing with here. Nothing has worked on the Bermuda grass. Nothing. However, I won't use Roundup in my garden. I'll just have to try the other things. We do live in a very arid climate, and Bermuda grass will not grow anywhere that isn't irrigated around here. So maybe after several years of no water, it will die. :shrug:

I'm serious about the foodscaping, though. If I can't kill the Bermuda grass, I may end up turning the garden into an orchard and just planting food plants everywhere else. I would love more foodscaping ideas.

[XemaSab]

5. Bermuda grass is the *only* thing I use round-up on

It's usually pretty easy to dig it back to tiny little sprigs, but the tiny sprigs run deep and they will take your yard right back over with no hesitation. If you nuke the sprigs, they die.

I figure nuking the bermuda with round-up is healthier for the existing plants than popping them out, digging out the bermuda grass, and putting them back in every year. :shrug:

[OnionPatch]

6. I can't really blame you for getting frustrated enough to use it.

I must admit I have nearly been tempted to nuke it myself because it seems so indestructible. It may well be about the only way to really kill the stuff off. You're so right about how it will just take over. I've heard that Roundup disintegrates fast but then I've also heard conflicting information, so I decided to err on the side of caution and keep the garden organic. I do think a couple of years without water in southern California chaparral country might kill it off, so maybe there's a way to do this without pesticides. I'm going to find out.

[XemaSab]

7. Roundup doesn't work THAT well on it

But it's a tool to have in the toolbox.

If it's any consolation, my friend who is a native plant landscape designer told me to use it.

He basically said that the stuff is so indestructible that anything that will work, you should use.

[hippywife]

2. For the love of Pete!

Please don't use Roundup. We have tons of bermuda grass and we were able to pretty much cover it and mulch it away in the garden. Please, please, please don't use Roundup.

Landscaping with food plants is a really great idea as long as you aren't using chemical pesticides and herbicides on the existing flowers.

[OnionPatch]

3. Hippywife, don't worry! I would never use Roundup!

I am totally against that stuff anywhere near my edibles. I don't like to even use it on ornamentals. But I do need to find a new solution because the mulch did not work on my Bermuda grass. I piled on tons of it. I even used landscape cloth and it grew right through it with hardly a pause. That stuff is next to indestructible. If worse comes to worse, I'll just turn the area into an orchard. Trees will grow fine in Bermuda turf.

[hippywife]

8. Glad to hear it!

I didn't mean to sound so crazy but the thought of how many chemicals already infiltrate our lives does make me a little nuts. LOL

Really it's one of those areas where I think we lose more than we know for the convenience these insidious things afford.

:hi:

[LWolf]

9. Don't till Bermuda.

My last place was overrun with bermuda. What a nightmare.

You don't kill bermuda. Seriously. Perhaps if you were willing to saturate your soil to a depth of 4 or 5 feet with something noxious that would kill every last thing in the soil, and repeat for several years, you might get it all.

Don't count on it, though.

Every last fragment of root or stem anywhere in the soil can sprout and begin to grow again. The more water, the faster and more prolific it will be. Even if you think you've killed it, when you start growing something, and watering, it will reappear.

Frankly, I'm surprised that it isn't growing in your flowerbeds and underneath your roses. It did in mine. Since my roses were growing in the bermuda lawn, I gave up trying to keep it clear. I pulled it out of my flower beds DAILY to try to keep the flowers a step ahead.

One bed, along the front of the house, was already overrun when I moved in. I tried to eradicate the bermuda for a year, and then called professional gardeners in. They dug as deep as they could, and finally told me it was hopeless. The bermuda roots when too far under the concrete slab foundation of the house for them to get them all.

In the beginning, I tried laying down a weed barrier, and planting on top of that. What a joke. It takes bermuda less than a season to destroy all the weed barriers I tried. Here is what I finally did:

I built raised beds, 3 feet high. 3 feet high, because the roots of garden plants would never reach below the soil surface. I put down 4 x 8 marine grade plastic plywood on the soil surface. No cracks, no rotting. I built the bed a foot in on all sides, so that the bermuda could not creep in at the edges. Then I filled with compost and topsoil delivered from a local landscaping company. All that was left to do was keep the bermuda at the edges of the plywood trimmed.

When I moved, my first priority when looking at prospective houses? No bermuda, not only on the property, but anywhere in the neighborhood.

[OnionPatch]

11. You sure were determined!

Wow, those beds sound great but also like they were a lot of work. I might have to do something similar though. I think it's worth a try to let it dry out for a few years first. Luckily, it's just on one corner of the lot (where the garden is. :() There is shade down the middle of the lot that the Bermuda won't cross over. My roses and other flower beds are on the other side of the shade, luckily. Although, who knows how long before some Bermuda pops up over there.

As for tilling it, I don't know how else to loosen up the soil in order to rake out the pieces. We also thought if we turned the soil every month or so in the summer, we would eventually expose even the deep down roots to the extreme heat and dryness at the surface. No water in 100+ degree daily heat for a few summers has got to kill most of it, I would think.

We don't plan to stay in this home permanently. I'll definitely do what you do when we move and check any prospective homes for Bermuda. "We're looking for a three bedroom-no Bermuda, please." :)

[Blue Gardener]

10. I grow peppers in my flower bed

Jalapenos and green peppers. I keep a pot of cherry tomatoes on the front porch.