I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!!! Sorry, I had to yell that because I've been fighting JUST the type of grass you mention, the kind that is tall, pops off at the root, is hollow in the middle, and just. Can't. Be. Eradicated. It grows MORE when you water and fertilize. I've also been gardening for years, it was when I branched out to another larger area that I've been fighting this. I too have read about winter sowing. Get Dick Francis' book The Joy of Gardening, he gets into this quite a bit and talks about sowing with beans or peas (depending on season) so that you get food with your green manure crop. I put an order in for Buckwheat but it was delayed and now its too late for me. :( So I put thousands of bean seeds down and they're coming up, but of course the grass is too fast. Now I'm going out there and pulling and cutting and hoeing between the seeds. It utter chaos. In another part of my garden I used straw bales. But those plants aren't growing at all, and now I think the the straw was grown with herbicide. My last-ditch garden plan is to move bales off to the side, keep attacking grass weeds, try to get all those bean seeds going and then in the fall, till it all under. You're right that tilling and digging does NOT DO ANYTHING. Smothering them does work, though. If my green cropping fails I will probably end up with a smothering method. I wish you luck. Maybe we need a support group. I'm only half joking about that.

It should not hurt your veggies, but takes up their space, nutrients, and light. B*yer makes a weed killer that is a growth hormone. And the liquid is redish color. That way you can tell where it sprays. Roselee said she puts some in a small spray bottle and carefully spritz a tad on the weed. Should any get on a veg, just pick that leaf off, right away. I would read the cautions carefully to be sure it is ok to use around vegetables. How this works, is the weed grows itself to death. I hope I have helped you. BTW, I picked my first cucumber today!

Well the root crops would best benefit from the deep bed. For the rest it doesn't really matter. Your bigger issue is going to be the different nutrient and water needs of the different vegetables. Put the broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts together but not near the beans or peas (they can go together). Put the lettuce by the cukes and keep all the squash plants together. I guess since you already have the plants you might as well plant them. They will either survive or they won't. You may have to replace them then but you may discover that you don't have room for everything on your list anyway so if something dies off the other plants will benefit from that space.. But you will have learned some valuable lessons in the mean time - Different plants have different needs. Not everything can be or should be planted all at the same time. And what looks like plenty of room now will look like an over-grown jungle in 2 months. :-) I would transplant the tomatoes into larger pots - no, they can't remain as is - and hold them back for a couple of weeks. But the cukes and zucchini and squash won't survive a double transplanting (into a larger pot and then into the garden) so all you can do is plant them and hope for the best. Next year think about direct seeding them at the proper time rather than using transplants. Same goes for beans. And this winter take the time to learn about the various correct planting dates for each vegetable for your location and the soil temps needed by various vegetables for transplanting. Do that before you invest in all the plants, ok? You might also want to learn about pre-warming garden soil methods so you can plant warm summer crops a bit earlier next year. Too late to do that this year as it takes several weeks. Dave

Tony, When you mention your bed depth, do you mean that you have bottoms under the beds, so that they're essentially very large containers, or just that you've put frames on the ground and filled them with soil? If your beds have bottoms under them, so that the roots can only dive two or three feet, that would IMO cause many problems...oh. I see the "sticks and logs". OK. I suspect that that layer has cut off your plants' world at the two or three foot mark, whether you have a bottom on the bed or not. You're effectively container gardening. When you're container gardening, your plants are dependent on you for everything. When you're gardening in the ground, they are much less dependent. In the ground, plants can dive WAY deeper than two or three feet. And they can benefit from the bank of moisture and nutrients down there. Edited to add: Oh, and roots can often go a lot more than two feet wide, too. Lettuces are very shallow-rooted, and their need for nutrients isn't that high. So it's not too much of a surprise that they're doing OK. I'm not at all surprised that your other plants are doing badly. I'm not saying that it was inevitable, but I also don't find it surprising. I would suggest that you fertilize, at the recommended levels, and see what happens. If that works, then that's pretty decent evidence that the soil that you purchased has low fertility. You say that you're going to buy more compost next season. But you succeeded, in the past, on the soil that you already have, right? And you want to avoid outside inputs, right? So why are you getting essentially ALL of your soil as an outside input, instead of using the local soil that was successful for you? If I could wave a magic wand, I would create a three-part experiment on your property: - I'd dig out one of the raised beds, remove that layer of branches and logs, remove the bottom of the bed if it has a bottom, dig a spade depth into the soil below the bed, and re-fill the bed with the purchased soil you've been using. - I'd dig out and clear out and dig below another raised bed in a similar way, but fill it with your own soil, mixed in with a modest amount of certified organic compost, of a brand other than the brand that you've used--or with compost of your own making. - I'd dig a third bed in the ground, digging at least one spade depth and ideally two, mixing in the same modest amount of the compost that you used in the second bed, but not raising it at all. Then next year I'd garden and see which one does better. I suspect that the first bed will do somewhat better than it did this year, the second bed will do fairly well, and the third bed will do fairly well. This year: Fertilize! I know that you hope to avoid fertilizing in the future, but fertilizing is IMO the best way to find out whether your issue is low fertility. Another possibility is water. What is your watering scheme for those beds? Have you tried digging down to see if they're getting wet all the way down? You have no capillary connection with the soil below, because of those logs, so those beds will likely dry out much, MUCH faster than your garden did when you were just gardening in the ground.