Grass Control

Identification

Grass is the common name for a wide variety of plants. Most often it refers to true grasses like wheat, barley, and the stuff on your lawn. Most have long, thin green leaves that grow from the base and reproduce by sending up a flowering shoot or by extending either a rhizome or a horizontal stolon along the ground.

Grass

Sod grass

Prairie grass

As much energy as people put into filling their yards with healthy green grass, there are occasions when grass can become an unwanted entity, when it grows beyond our control, or inhabits a space meant for another purpose. One major example might be establishing a new garden space in your yard. This can be a time-consuming and laborious process that often begins with removing grass and devising a method for controlling the remaining grass surrounding the space. Time, sunlight, and a lack of airflow can do most of the work for you if you can plan ahead a year or so. If it's a spur-of-the-moment thing, well, you had better get your work gloves out and your shovel ready.

Controlling Grass

If you like backbreaking labor, digging sod is the method for you. If it's a young sod, peeling it up won't be too hard. If it's older grass, those roots are going to go in pretty deep. Busting up that sod is going to be tough. Use a shovel to cut through the surface of the grass and break it up into manageable chunks. It's a good idea to shake out the dirt that will inevitably come with the roots. Once the sod is removed, it's time to till up the soil and see what you have to work with. Often you will need to add more soil to bring the garden up past the level of the surrounding yard.

You could also use newspaper as a mulch to control grass. First use a weed whip to shave the grass as low as you can over the entire area. On a calm day, begin layering newspaper over it and be sure to spray it with water to keep it from flying off. You will need a lot of newspaper to make it thick enough to keep the grass from poking through (maybe a dozen layers). Once you have a good layer of wet newspaper, load it up with composted mulch to hold it down. Check back after a couple months or more. The paper should have decomposed and you should have a grass-free bed in which to plant a garden.

Black plastic will kill an area of grass over time. Start by planning, marking, and measuring out the area of grass you wish to kill and trim that area as short as you can. Figure out how much plastic you are going to need if you're going to use two layers. Pick a calm day and bring a friend. Lay the plastic down and anchor it throughout with rocks. Shovel a ring of soil or mulch around the edge of the plastic to hold down and seal it. Check after rain to make sure it's still secure. If it's sunny, it won't take long to kill everything under that plastic. Give it a month or two before peeling it up and prepping your soil for gardening.

Landscape fabric will keep grass from growing. Another option that takes a little more time and commitment is a permeable weed-barrier fabric. This product is ideal for landscape-type gardens where you might have a decorative bush here and there surrounded by wood mulch or rocks. You can put the fabric over grass and it will probably kill the grass eventually, but there is a chance that it might pop through one of the small holes. Using plastic or herbicides to kill the grass before putting the fabric down would be the best option. Be sure to prevent dead leaves from collecting and degrading on the mulch or you will be creating soil for grass seeds to grow. This will render the fabric pointless.

Use edging when putting in a new garden. After you have killed or removed grass from an area and worked up the soil to prepare it for a garden, you should think about installing an edging to prevent the surrounding sod from spreading into your newly grass-free zone. If you want it to last, get the good wide stuff with the metal stakes. It will be well worth your investment. Start by digging a six-inch-deep trench around the border. Try to get the sod edge close to vertical. Set the height by backfilling dirt so that the round top will only be half exposed. Stake the edging perpendicularly and refill the trench. Be sure to pack it down a bit for good measure.

Chemical Grass Control

The easiest way to keep grass out of your flower bed is to spray it with a non-selective herbicide like Roundup (glyphosate). Be careful. It will kill everything it touches and might stick around a while and kill things you plant in the area. If you don't want to risk potential over-spraying you can simply paint the Roundup on the area of grass you wish to control. Another option is a selective herbicide like Grass-B-Gone (fluazifop). If you're careful with it, you shouldn't have to worry too much about getting it on non-grassy plants.

Natural Grass Control

Grass torch. If you are looking to get rid of grass around a fence line, you might want to look into a Red Dragon Propane Torch. It's not a permanent solution and it's not something you would want to use on a windy day in a prairie region during a drought, but it is effective at knocking down grass by boiling the water inside of it.

Organic herbicides. BurnOut Grass Killer uses an extract of cloves and citrus oils to kill grass and weeds. Safer Brand Grass Killer uses a type of potassium salt to kill the same. Both would be safer options to using Roundup and they might actually work faster. White distilled vinegar can be used to kill grass as well.

Get a goat. Heck get two—that is, if you live somewhere that allows such a thing. The thing with goats is that they don't like being contained, so some kind of electric fencing is necessary unless you have a taller border fence around your property. For all of their attitude, they are also very good at mowing down grass and turning it into goat berries.