It seems to me that the method you plan to use will only provide more nutrition for the grass, encouraging it to better health and vigor. Yes, building large square foot or linear type beds, lining the bottoms with old carpeting covered with black plastic is a method you should consider. In the long run it may be the easiest method, although the cedar lumber required is expensive. If this were my garden I would do the following. First, using a trencher or tiller, dig a trench around the entire perimeter of the garden. Into the trench pour borax powder (it is available in 50# bags) heavily and cover the trench. Then plan on having a four foot wide walking path around the garden which is never planted. Borax kills and this should stop the canary reed grass from encroaching on the garden. Treatment may have to be repeated about every 5 years. Then, I would cover one half of the garden with black plastic, pegging firmly and solarize that section for the summer. On the other half of the garden I would stake out my rows, create 4' wide beds and mound up new, good soil/compost on top. The paths between the planting mounds would be tilled often to knock back the grass. Then the second year I would move the mounded soil onto the solarized side, again creating mounded beds and solarize the other half of the garden through that summer. A lot work! But if you have the patience to solarize for two years you should be rid of the problem grass and be able to remove the plastic and have a normal garden. Hopefully there is a company near you making concrete block. Such companies often have 'seconds' which are not suitable for building and they will sell the blocks for a reasonable cost. If you can find some they are very useful to hold down plastic and/or to build raised beds.

Tree, I collect old hay from local ranchers. Sometimes you can find it listed on Craigslist or Freecycle and all you have to do is haul it away. I am very careful to check and ensure it was not sprayed with herbicides. If the answer is not a firm "no, it was not", I don't use it. This year I am using the last bales from a huge amount (over 200 bales) of native pasture grass/hay given to me a couple of years ago. I'm starting to worry about what I'll use when I use up these last few bales. We have a grass catcher on our lawn mower and catch all the grass clippings and use them as mulch. We have a large lawn and it does not even come close to providing all the mulch we need, but the grass clippings help. We overseed our lawn with rye grass seed in September and cut it all winter long, catching those clippings in the grass catcher and putting them on the beds. That gets me off to a decent start with mulching even before planting season starts. When I have to buy hay, I only buy alfalfa, which unfortunately is very expensive so I don't buy it often. Alfalfa is a broad-leaved legume so it cannot be sprayed by the persistent herbicides that have led to contaminated compost, mulch and manure in the last decade. You can mulch with anything, and when I mulch I like to put down a layer of cardboard or several sheets of newspaper as the first layer because that helps keep seeds from sprouting in the soil beneath the mulch. You can use chopped or shredded autumn leaves. I collect them in fall, bag them up and save them for spring. You can use pine bark fines or any other finely shredded or ground mulch. I especially like to use a product sold as "sold conditioner" that contains humus and pine bark fines. It is a 'feeding mulch' that breaks down pretty quickly and enriches the soil, which is really great for clay soil. You can use any form of bark mulch if you choose. Some people worry it ties up nitrogen in the soil as it decomposes, but I've never found that to be an issue with bark that is on the surface of the ground. It could be an issue with bark rototilled into the soil. If available in your area, you can use pecan shells (often available from companies that process pecans) or pine straw (we don't have lots of pine trees in southcentral OK but I assume at least some parts of OK have them). If you were near a sawmill or woodworking company that lets people come collect their sawdust, you could use it. Almost any material will work. Sometimes if you see tree-trimming companies cutting and shredding tree limbs in your area, if you ask nicely they will come dump a load of the shredded tree trimmings on your property. It saves them the cost of paying a disposal fee to dump that material at a local dump. I start out with a thin layer of grass clippings on the garden as the soil warms up in spring, then layer on more mulch continually each week as we mow. Because our grass clippings from our own lawn are chemical free and don't contain a lot of weed seeds, I prefer to put them on the raised beds and I use the old, spoiled hay in the pathways and in areas where we don't have raised beds, like in the corn patch. When I pull weeds (before they have set seeds) in the veggie garden, I just place them on top of the mulched beds where they will serve as part of the mulch. As they break down, they put back into the soil the nutrition they absorbed from it while growing. You even can grow your own mulch by planting something that produces a lot of biomass, and harvesting it regularly to use as mulch. I use some cover crops in this way, mowing them off short (but not so short they won't regrow) and putting the clippings in the garden as mulch. You can use some clovers, rye grass and buckwheat in this way. I also grow comfrey strictly so I can cut its leaves and use them as mulch or as fodder for the compost piles. If you have half-finished compost, you can use it as mulch too. As the garden season progresses and you remove spent plants, if they are disease-free, you can add them to the beds as mulch. It won't look as nice as clean straw or hay or bark mulch, but it does the job. I even chop up corn stalks and use them as mulch after the corn is through producing. It doesn't really matter what you use or how you use it as long as it is safe and isn't introducing chemicals or disease pathogens into your growing areas. If you live in town more so than out in the country, big box stores or nurseries would be your best bet. If you need a lot, some soil suppliers or even some municipalities sell mulch in bulk but sometimes it costs so much to have it delivered that you don't really spend that much less than you would have spent on bagged mulch. Dawn

How do you best handle red thread? I have several spots in my lawn that have red thread. Last year I did a couple of treatments on the whole lawn using a Scott lawn disease treatment....but that is expensive because it's a big lawn. This year I have been treating the areas of greatest impact;I also use a thatcher several times a year. My lawn looks a lot better this year, but I can still see patches of red thread. Personally, I'm thinking my best bet is re-seed with a grass that is more resistant to red thread. I was thinking of trying Jonathan Green Black Beauty. What do you think is the best course of action?

OK, how are you getting more than one picture in your posts? Are you having to code native HTML? Anyway ... The goldfinches are back and have been for several days now. I wanted to be sure they were back before I got excited about it, LOL! I think maybe they were busy molting as they are now showing their spring/summer colors. A few are still a little scruffy looking but in the main they appear to have finished molting. I have discovered that the reason my tube feeder empties out faster than my mesh feeder (both are filled with nyjer) is at least partly because for every seed a bird grabs, 2 or 3 more spill out on the ground. Which explains why there are mourning doves under that feeder most of the time. The mesh feeder doesn't seem to spill nearly so much, especially not in a wind (as it was VERY windy today). So there is very little seed spilled from that feeder, but a lot of hulls. So mourning doves aren't bothering with that even though it's over concrete and the other is over grass. Not only that, but it turns out that the house finches can't feed at the wire mesh feeder. Their bills are too large to get through the mesh. I've seen the odd house finch land, cling, and give it a peck or two, and then give up and move to the tube feeder or the sunflower seed feeder (usually the latter). So - BONUS! Essentially that wire mesh feeder is a goldfinches only feeder. The house finches will chase goldfinches away from the tube feeder once in awhile, but they never bother with the wire mesh feeder. Seems like a win-win to me - less seed waste and no competition for the goldfinches. So I will be retiring the tube feeder anon. In the meantime I guess I will add a hanging platform feeder. I will probably try the looker 12x12 feeder with the cover. Allegedly it keeps out larger birds like crows and starlings and grackles but lets cardinals and the like still feed. We'll see. Because the cardinals sure don't like the squirrel buster I have (it is the standard and does not have the cardinal ring). I am seeing chickadees in some numbers now, and continue to see song sparrows and house finches. Occasionally I see a cardinal but they don't stay long unless there is seed on the ground (hence the thought that I should get a platform feeder). There is also something that I swear looks like a monster mutant chickadee - the thing is ginormous if it is actually a chickadee. I haven't been quick enough with the binoculars to get a really thoroughly good look at it yet. I suppose it COULD be a house sparrow - but it really doesn't have the kind of scruffy looking markings I would expect, though admittedly until I can get a good long clear look at it with the binoculars I can't swear to that given my generally pretty poor eyesight sans binocs. I did see some blackbirds fly through the feeder complex today but it didn't appear that they stopped anywhere. It was too fast to tell what sort of blackbirds - starlings, cowbirds, grackles, or some other sort of blackbird. Nowhere big enough to be crows. But it does give me pause, what with wanting to put up a feeder for the cardinals without having it taken over by grackles or something. Here is a link that might be useful: Looker 12x12 hanging platform (pictured with optional cover) This post was edited by zensojourner on Thu, Apr 17, 14 at 4:56