When we plant "meadow/prairie" areas with Bermuda grass, we make sure to complete at least 2 grow kill cycles to prepare the soil. That involves making sure that everything is actively growing and spraying Roundup and spreading a pre-emergent. Bermuda grass produces an enormous amount of seeds if allowed to set. We let all that die and let a new round of weeds come up followed by another round of Roundup and pre-emergent. That is about all most people are willing to endure, although if I had my way I would complete another round. Each round takes about 3 weeks. Then we go in with native grass plugs leaving the ground untilled. If you till the area you will just expose more weed seeds. After about 6 months, the grass will be filling in nicely and you can heavily sow the wildflower seeds. There may be some bermuda grass that survives, but it is controllable by either roundup or digging it out. Just be careful with the spray. With these types of gardens, site preparation is incredibly important if you want to increase your chance of success.

Hi Sharon, Please, oh please, tell us it is not bermuda grass! Well, there are not a lot of options. She can hand-pull and hand-dig the grass every time it appears. She'll need to do it religiously because if she ignores it for a week or more, the grass will take over. There's always the chemical route, but spraying anything in/near a bed that size can result in "drift" of the berbicide getting on the desirable plants and killing them. Tomatoes, in particular, are especially vulnerable to herbicide drift and can be killed by the drift of glyphosates applied as far as a mile away. Instead of spraying, she could use a foam paint brush or a rag to daub the herbicide onto the grass. She could use a glyphosate like Round-Up or a grasskiller like Ornamec or Grass-B-Gone. Some over-the-top herbicides like Ornamec can be used to remove grass from wildflower plantings and beds of ornamental plants, but I don't know if it is labeled for use in the vegetable garden. There is a fairly effective organic herbicide called Scythe. It is not easy to find unless you have a really top-notch nursery that carries a lot of organic supplies, but you can order it online. It is not as effective as chemical herbicides, but it is safer to use. Whether y'all use a chemical herbicide or an organic herbicide, it probably will take repeated applications. There is nothing that will make the grass just stop trying to grow.....although some of the herbicides can knock them back for a couple of months. Then there is the mulch option. You could lay down a good quality, heavy-cloth landscape fabric, cutting "X" shapes to slip over the plants. Pile mulch on top of that to an eventual depth of 4". (You'd probably have to add a thinner layer until the plants get a little height, but could continue to layer on more and more as the plants grow.) Or, you could use cardboard, or newspaper 20 pages thick, in the same way. Even then, grass will come up and find its' way through, but not as much as you'd see otherwise. If it were in my yard, I think I'd try to find and remove all the grass I could right now by digging down and finding it. Then, I'd do a heavy, heavy mulch. Then, I'd go ahead and buy a herbicide like Scythe or Round-Up and be ready to aggressive attack every blade of grass that shows up. I think grass invasion of first-year garden beds is the reason that many, many new gardeners throw in the towel their first year. And, in case anyone is wondering if a pre-emergent herbicide would help, I think it probably wouldn't. First of all, most pre-emergents are not labeled for use around food crops. Secondly, they only work to keep seeds from sprouting and not to prevent perennial weeds/grasses coming back from their roots. Third, they provide a chemical barrier that keeps seeds from sprouting, so to be most effective, they would have needed to be applied at the ground level beneath the raised bed because, for the most part, that's where the seeds would be. There is one organic pre-emergent, and it is corn gluten meal. If they want, they could apply it to the top of their bed to keep any seeds that blow into their sandy loan/compost from sprouting. Corn gluten meal is safe and can be used around food crops, but will have no effect on stuff that sprouts several inches down and comes up through the raised bed. Also, because so much of the corn nowadays is going to alternative fuels, corn gluten meal has become very high-priced. About the only positive at this point is: (a) your daughter obviously has a very sweet gentleman friend who wanted to give her the lovely gift of a little watermelon patch, and (b) it is a fairly small patch, so keeping the grass out of it will be fairly simple. (Be grateful it's not 25' x 25' or something similar.) Well, and having any garden plot is a positive too, even it if is grass-infested and sure to be a challenge! Good luck, Dawn

red_geranium refects my experiance. Except for 2 spots I had. One an ally bed that got blazing west sun. I put up that cute little wire bed edging fence. Laid down a thick layer of wet newspapers, then proceeded to dump grass clippings and shredded leaves. Layers and layers of them up to the top of that wire edging...over a period of about 9 months and then let it just sit. I pulled any weeds or grass that did poke through. Not much did and it was easy to pull due to the composting going on underneath. . Then I planted the whole thing with huge red cannas and artemisia at the front. Very little grass and weeds grow there now. It worked for that area, because it was in the alley and I could just leave it that way for a long time before planting. Once planted no light gets to the grass so it doesn't try to grow anymore, by the time it warms up enough to trigger the grass the cannas have blocked the light from getting through. The other area was along the side of the house. I did pretty much the same thing. It took several years of constant composting to kill off the grass. But I also had to do a lot of pulling as well. It wasn't planted with cannas, but daisies, roses and moonflower bush and 4 o'clocks. I still had to weed and pull grass in that bed but it was much easier to pull stuff out since the clay had turned to nice garden soil. Most people don't want a huge pile of composting going on in their beds for over a year, and don't want to plant as thickly as I did, so yes, you have to kill the grass first.

Thank you very much for the information David, but a couple of things aren't clear to me. You wrote, "In the end the 2,4,5 T or 2,4, D are NOT anywhere near as dangerous as the DIOXIN by-product created from making these 'weed-killers'." Well, at least that's good to know. "It" was stopped being made years ago." What 'it' was stopped -- the manufacture of glyphosate? "But by law the stuff made still can be sold until the supply is exhausted." Do you mean the supply of Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, will not be made when the supply that was made years ago is exhausted? "The PAN reference I was looking the other day says Scotts stopped in 1996. To still 14 years later have product seems unbelievable so I need to figure out how long ago Ortho was bought out by Scotts because this part still doesn't make sense to me as yet." Does this mean that when the previously made supply of glyphosate runs out Roundup will no longer be available? And that presumably Scott bought up Ortho's supply? BTW, didn't Monsanto spend millions developing plants that were resistant to Roundup so the weeds could be sprayed without it affecting the food crop and called the seeds to those food crops 'Roundup ready'? Why would they do that if the manufacture of Roundup is to be discontinued? I just read this on Monsanto's site: "Roundup® agricultural herbicides are the flagship of Monsanto's agricultural chemicals business. The properties of Roundup agricultural herbicides and other glyphosate products can be used as part of an environmentally responsible weed control program and fit with the vision of sustainable agriculture and environmental" Sorry to be so dense but I really don't understand all this. I didn't even know that Grass b Gone was related to Round Up. I'm not educated in chemistry and thought that the 2,4, numbers, etc. just referred to where molecules attached to one another and not were not necessarily referring to molecules that were related to one another. In other words I thought fluazifop (Grass B Gone) was unrelated to glyphosate (Roundup). But if they are closely related it seems that Roundup would be pulled as well as Grass B Gone. So if anyone can clarify some of this I'd appreciate it. Thanks in advance.