You can use round up.

I regularly edge my mulch beds and spray in the beds right next to ornamentals.

Round up is going to kill or damage anything the wet spray contacts. That includes direct spray, drip from the nozzle, or mist carried by wind.

Sounds scary, but is very easy to do without killing everything in sight. Rule 1, only spray on a calm day. No wind. Rule 2, only pump the sprayer up a little. Low pressure won't create misting like high pressure will.

You can also use boiling water from a kettle to kill the zoysia that invaded the mulch. Even though zoysia has both stolons and rhizomes, the effect of the water won't spread to the zoysia outside the mulch.

But that's the rub. It sounds like you're worried that a chemical like Roundup would be transported via the rhizomes to the zoysia just outside the bed, and harm that zoysia too. My guess is Roundup won't be transported far from where you apply it as long as you apply it carefully, but, then again, empirical testing would be better than a guess. Someone who has actually sprayed zoysia with Roundup would have to chime in on the extent to which Roundup is transported via the rhizomes to other parts of the grass.

You could also fill a spray bottle with 5 percent distilled white vinegar to dispatch the zoysia in the mulched bed. Or just pour the vinegar onto the zoysia there. You'll need to spray heavily with the vinegar--not just a quick couple of spritzes--because zoysia is a tough grass. I'd give it 5 or 6 squirts from the spray bottle. Shower it in vinegar. Zoysia is tough. If you mix in a few drops of dish washing liquid into the vinegar spray bottle, that will improve the vinegar's killing ability.

So which zoysia do you prefer? Do you think the seeded Zenith zoysia looks better or the thicker, hybrid Emerald zoysia? What are your thoughts about your two kinds of zoysia?

Thank you all for the responses. ZoysiaSod, I prefer Zenith all the way. It has a wide blade grass and almost looks like Fescue. Please see picture below. We had this sod put down in May of last year and this is what it looked like in the summer. This year it has greened up earlier than expected I think due to our mild winter and having some hot days but we still have a mixture of brown grass with the green grass. We did fertilize this past weekend and got lots of rain. I hope the brown disappears. We do have one area over on the side of the house that has a couple of spots where the grass is scarce and you can actually see the dirt. I hope the zoysia will eventually fill in these areas. They weren't there last year. There was no need to put down a weed killer because we do not have any weeds. Some of the brown mixture in the grass is almost like straw. Do you need to get the brown loose grass out of there with a rake or just leave it alone? Any help would be appreciated. My husband and I are new to this.

{{gwi:91298}}

The grass on the side of the house that is scarce is becoming scarcer because of the shade around there. You might consider a different ground cover...like mulch! Let the grass invade the mulch as much as it wants to and leave it alone. Mulch is not nearly as messy as the mud you will eventually have there.

Oh and your lawn is beautiful!

Sorry for my long absence folks. I got sidetracked on 2 projects: house painting and flowery annuals. The warm weather was distracting too. Boiling water will dispatch the zoysia pronto, leaving lots of dead brown zoysia, but one has to be careful about runoff of the boiling water. If the water reaches your regular grass outside the bed of mulch, that zoysia will die too. What did you eventually decide on?

Don't waste your time with Boiling Water. All it will do is kill the soil, and possible burn yourself in the process....

Get yourself a good size cardboard box and break it down to make a shield. On a calm day spray the Zoysia with RoundUp Pro using the shield to form a hard line on the border.

If you have ever seen professional house painters using a sprayer you will see they use a big wide spatula looking device that does the same thing to keep control of the over-spray and make hard lines. You want to do the same thing with the box.

Don't waste your time using Roundup. It will kill the beneficial bacterial and beneficial fungi in the soil that the grass relies upon to take in nourishment. Boiling water is a recognized good Organic method to eliminate weeds, according to lawn care professional and published book author Paul Tukey, writing in The Organic Lawn Care Manual.

For more info about the very negative effects on the soil of synthetic herbicides like Roundup, see this thread:

Jamur Zoysia in Atlanta

ZoysiaSod - be careful when you start claiming absolutes. It causes disturbances in the force. There are a lot of otherwise organic lawn people carefully using RoundUp without any apparent problems with the underlying soil biology. I say no apparent problems because new things start growing in immediately which you would not expect from a serious soil contamination.

If you want to kill microbes you need something designed to do the job. The single most disastrous soil contamination I am aware of is spreading sawdust from treated lumber (voice of personal ignorance and experience here).

Once again you are quoting one of the reasons I dislike Paul Tukey. As TW said, boiling water is dangerous. Furthermore, as soon as you pour boiling water onto the thermal mass of the Earth at room temperature, it becomes room temperature water. It does appear to cook the tops of grass on the way. The zoysia I've seen is super sensitive to any environmental changes, so boiling water might very well knock it out for a full season, but I'm betting it will be back to normal next season.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a book once but that doesn't mean it was the truth or that I like it.

Don't waste your time using Roundup. It will kill the beneficial bacterial and beneficial fungi in the soil that the grass relies upon to take in nourishment.

You have no idea of what you are talking about. All you are doing is repeating Green Mafia Blather and Propaganda.

Dchall wrote:

> Furthermore, as soon as you pour boiling water onto the thermal mass of the Earth at room temperature, it becomes room temperature water. It does appear to cook the tops of grass on the way. The zoysia I've seen is super sensitive to any environmental changes, so boiling water might very well knock it out for a full season, but I'm betting it will be back to normal next season.

Dchall, I'm surprised that you're just betting, and don't actually know from empirical testing and experience.

From what you wrote above, it sounds like you just recently tried pouring boiling water onto zoysia for the very first time ever. I'm surprised with all your years of experience with lawns, that this is the very first time you've tried this, and so you can't report definitively to us of the results. It sounds like an appalling gap in your knowledge. You've thoroughly derided author Paul Tukey on numerous occasions in the past, but it's obvious to me he has much more experience with lawn care than you.

I can tell you that boiling water poured onto zoysia in a rock mote underneath an ornamental bush prevents the zoysia from returning next season as long as a buried plastic weed barrier is used to prevent new zoysia from entering the bed of rocks.

Not just the tops of the grass die, but the rhizomes and stolons discolor and die almost immediately when boiling water is poured onto zoysia--and I have more robust, hardier zoysia than you: the coarser bladed Meyer Zoysia. The rhizomes and stolons die quickly. So unlike you, I can speak from experience in this matter.

You've said in the past that although you disagree with author Paul Tukey, you're a big fan of the authors of the book Teaming With Microbes, the Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web. The Teaming authors Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis would be horrified by your use of Roundup, yet you claim to be an Organic practitioner.

Unlike your claim above, Roundup cannot be part of any legitimate organic program. It's one of the worst synthetic herbicides there is. True organic practitioners would vehemently disagree with your use of Roundup.

Texas-Weed wrote:
> You have no idea of what you are talking about. All you are doing is repeating Green Mafia Blather and Propaganda.

Texas-Weed, don't you think the "Bermuda Bible" is a bit of a misnomer? I've read your
"Bermuda Bible" on the internet. It's barely 2 pages long. Most bibles I'm familiar
with are hundreds of pages long. Maybe if you called it the "Bermuda Pamphlet" [Chuckle]

Well, really, I've even seen pamphlets that are longer than 2 pages. I thought they made
things big in Texas. Are you sure you're Texan?? Lol. "The Bermuda Bible"--oh yes, it's
a bible alright. Lol.

I don't believe you're Texan [chuckle]

See ZS, getting off topic is one thing, but when you run afar off topic and do so with an emotional splendor, you lose credibility. You don't need to respond emotionally to every criticism of things you say and things you don't even say but quote from others. We all speak for ourselves.

The reason I'm betting, as highlighted in red, bold, enlarged, in your quote; is because my zoysia (Shadow Turf, not Meyer) comes back every year from seeming certain death the year before. If I only have one living root, I can be assured of complete coverage. My bet was that the boiling water would leave one living root and thus I could not be assured of anything the following year. Your experiment is commendable. If you had presented it better you would have, as I said, more credibility.

Do I use it? Not really, but I ran an interesting experiment with it this year. I bought a home in George West, TX last year. There is a bougainvillaea in back that was choked with bind weed, a creeping vine that wraps tightly around anything it can. I had heard that bind weed emanated from a central root system and that dipping a single strand of bind weed into RU would kill the entire plant. I bought some concentrated RU and a glass vase with a bulb shape. I put about half a bulb worth of RU in the vase and stuffed a strand of bind weed into it. A week later the strand of bind weed was toast but the rest of the plant seemed hardy as ever. Well I already had the vase of RU so I stuck another strand in. At the time I was thinking this was going to be a loooooonnnnngggg process and not worth the trouble. That was several months ago. Today the bind weed is gone. The reason I wanted to run this experiment was to test someone else's theory but also to see if I could actually kill a plant without spraying the entire plant along with all the adjacent soil. To me it seemed like the most minimally invasive way to use RU that I'd ever heard. I would say with some caution that this technique should be looked at by others to see if it works for them. Perhaps the bind weed simply did not like my infrequent watering patterns.

I do like Lowenfels much better than Tukey. Lowenfels knows his microbes. If he says RoundUp is the worst synthetic product, I guess I would want to see the context of the sentence and go from there. Does it kill microbes or does he have a problem with the follow-on technologies of making RoundUp Ready genetically modified seeds? On the other hand, people out here in the practical land of the Internet lawn forums have, on many occasions, used RoundUp successfully. Some of them have otherwise been using nothing but organic fertilizers for years and years. The reasons for using RU vary, but most want to do a renovation and need instant results to get the job done. Go ahead and deny them their OMRI certification and see if they care. The end result was they were able to replant their yard immediately. While RU cannot play a part in a "certified organic agriculture program," it is used every day by people otherwise using nothing but organic products.

I have two problems with Paul Tukey. The first is he does not qualify his statements. He makes statements that seem to fit his personal experience but leaves out the real world around him. When he says you can dispense with the 1-inch per week watering schedule for organic lawns, he cannot possibly be speaking of the grass in the south. Organic or not is only one factor in a long list of factors which determine how much water your turf will use in a week. Qualify your statements. He says, "Always overseed your lawn in spring (!) or fall." Always?? Really??? Sorry but that blanket advice does not apply to anyone with a sod forming turf like KBG, bentgrass, bermuda, centipede, St Augustine, bahia, or zoysia. Qualify your statements. He says to learn to make compost tea and apply 1 qt per 1,000 square feet every month. In the summer in the south that makes no sense. When water temps approach 80 degrees F, compost tea becomes sludge water because there is essentially no dissolved oxygen to keep the microbes alive in the tea. Qualify your statements. He says each lawn should contain 5% clover to fix nitrogen into the soil. In the south, clover can become 100% of the turf in one season unless you keep after it. 5% is hilarious. Qualify your statements.

Secondly is he does not seem to be tuned in to what the rest of the world is doing with lawn care. He seems to be relying on old information and does not care about the hundreds of posts per week from people like you asking questions and getting replies...also from people like you. If he did those two things I think it would reform some of his opinions about lawn care. It certainly did reform mine. If he had been busy in the forums he would realize his blanket statements were not the universal truth of lawn care. I'm not saying he's a quack as some organic gurus come across, I'm not saying he ignorant - I'm saying he needs to keep up to pace with the rest of the world and keep learning as we go. And learn to qualify his blanket statements so some people won't ruin their lawns.

I don't believe you're Texan

I don't care what you think. I live in AZ now. You are just embarrassing yourself with your BLATHER.

That's funny, because I thought you were embarrassing yourself. Both you and Dchall.

It will kill the beneficial bacterial and beneficial fungi in the soil that the grass relies upon to take in nourishment.

ZS this statement clearly demonstrates you have no idea of what RoundUp is, or how it works.

RU does not interact with any fungi or bacteria in its active state. Withing 24 hours of application it starts to breaks down to carbon dioxide and nitrogen. If you had done any real research you would know that and not make such statements.

So here are some facts for you to chew on. RoundUp is an Organic Compound from the Phosphonates ester family of phosphonic acid and has the general formula RP(=O)(OR')2. It is made from Glycerin.

TW, why don't you ever provide any sources for your statements?

What's your source for the statements above so we can all read the original copy in its full context.

....Also, Texas-Weed, your statement that "RoundUp is an Organic Compound from the Phosphonates ester family of phosphonic acid and has the general formula RP(=O)(OR')2" is misleading. Any compound that has the element Carbon in it is considered part of Organic Chemistry, but that doesn't mean it's beneficial. Organophosphates generally aren't.

why don't you ever provide any sources for your statements?

Because this website does not require sources in order to post. This is a site to share personal experiences and helpful information we might have picked up elsewhere.

I did some checking to see what Jeff Lowenfels had to say about RoundUp. I learned a couple things. One - I had always pronounced glyphosate wrong. Secondly, Lowenfels is an organic purist who hates anything he cannot pronounce. That is very well and good, but what do you use when you want to kill one invasive grass that is heading across the mulch toward the other invasive grass? I suppose on a small scale, you could put a little elbow grease into it and pull the invader out. But I wonder what Lowenfels would suggest to kill a yard full of bermuda, zoysia, or creeping charlie in preparation for a renovation back to a different turfgrass.

Also if you want to learn a lot more about RoundUp check the wikipedia page. Then check the wikipedia page for glyphosate.

I have certainly been amused by the posts in this thread over the past 4 days. Reading this has given me the visual image of 3 little boys arguing over whose daddy is better...

Little Boy #1: "Well my daddy can lift his truck with his bare hands"

Little Boy #2: "Oh yeah? Well, my daddy can tackle a charging bull by himself"

Little Boy #3: "Oh yeah? Well, my daddy can burp, fart, and blow water out his nose at the same time"

Litlle Boys #1 & #2: "Wooooooow"

Just put a tank mix of boiling water and Glyphosate on the damn zoysia, kill it, and move on! Geez.

Oh, you're right, NearAndWest. Thanks for your funny burst of humor. Much welcomed.

Agreed. Go back and read, Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten.

Aye currumba I think ill stay out of this one..

Actually, nearandwest, this reminds me more of two little boys playing peacefully together and a third little boy appears out of nowhere to preach to them for no good reason.

While I can respect the opinions of organic purists, I have no desire to listen to their sermons. This would explain why I do very little posting at this site. I do incorporate many organic principles in my lawn care. However, I'd sooner take a bath in Round Up rather than carrying boiling water all over the back yard. If RU has ever harmed me, I don't know it. I darn sure know what happens when I spill boiling water on myself.

you know, there is an organic forum.

Yes, there is. I have enough respect for the organic purist that I try very hard not to use the letters R and U in the same sentence with each other when I'm in an organic forum.

Unfortunately, the Great Commission for organic purists forces them to go unto all the internet world preaching against the horrors of any and all chemicals.

very true david_tx

Unfortunately, the Great Commission for organic purists forces them to go unto all the internet world preaching against the horrors of any and all chemicals.

That would be the Green Mafia where facts mean nothing.