quick (and fairly easy) fixes: mulch, mulch and more mulch in the flower beds. also, edging the lawn regularly would probably help. aside from that, you're probably just going to have to pull a few out that creep in now and again. keeping on it consistently is the best defense!

more involved (and drastic) solutions: aside from addressing the overall turf issue, baking the weed seeds in your flower beds would be effective. see link for how to. after you've done that you could put down some weed cloth before replanting the beds. of course these solutions may not be ideal if you have invested in a lot of nice perennials/just spent a lot of time planting up the bed. if they are annuals/veggies you can just wait for them to finish out their season or temporarily relocate the perennials to pots or another spot in the garden.

hope that is of some help! good luck with the invasive grasses---weeds---they are the pits! :)

Here is a link that might be useful: bake weed seeds

I use the plastic edging from Home Depot. It comes in 4 ft. strips that snap together. It keeps the grass from spreading underground into the planting bed. It works fine. You can use 4x4 lumber, rock, or anything else that goes down a few inches into the soil. The nice thing about the plastic edging is that it's almost completely buried, so it doesn't get in the way of the lawn mower. Also, it's very easy to bend around corners.

I'm a pretty experienced gardener, and I still haven't found a good solution to your problem, if what you have is bermuda grass. It will grow under most border edgings, or sneak thru where the edgings overlap or crack, or creep over the top when you're not looking. I really think bermuda ought to be an honorary bamboo! When forced to put a bed in where bermuda exists, what I usually do is plant an 18 inch swatch of annuals along the edge of the bed. Then when I take them out in the fall, I meticulously dig out every bit of bermuda that escaped my control efforts, so next summer I start with a clean bed again. It's a pain, but it's the only thing I've found that works, at least for a while. Eventually a piece gets overlooked, and the bermuda gets a foothold, and the whole bed needs to be dug up, the bermuda blasted into oblivion by roundup, and it's time to start the whole struggle over again. I'd love to plant a bed in my front yard between my neighbor and myself, but I haven't bothered because the thought of coping with the bermuda stops me, I have too much yardwork already to start another epic bermuda battle at my age. Sue

If you google "bermuda grass control", you'll find lots of good stuff.

I used to have to same problem. The best you can hope for with Bermuda is control, rather than eradication, ("honorary bamboo"? LOL Good one, Davissue!), but with diligence, determination, and perserverance, it can be tamed.
I dug a narrow deep trench between my lawn and the perennial bed cutting through roots, then on hands and knees dug up and sifted through all the soil in the perennial area getting all the tiny pieces of root. (Leave one little piece and it starts all over again). I sifted every day for 3 days. You'll never get all the pieces...some of those roots go all the way to China! I planted my beds and did the eagle-eye watch for the first year, hand pulling/finger digging to make sure I got the roots and pulled the ever-creeping stuff out of the trench.
That was about 6 year ago. Every now and then a piece of the demonweed will pop up, but I yank it as soon as I see it and it's pretty well under control. (Oh yeah, I also took out the lawn area by the same method and planted thyme and a pathway so most of the stuff was removed)

Good luck!

wanda

But how do you get rid of that stringy stuff when it's taking over the lawn itself? The lawn is rapidly becoming stringy, ugly, bermuda grass. Is that stuff also called "devil's grass"?

Well, I have 2 grasses. My front yard is St. Augustine and my back yard is Marathon II. The St. Augustine completely blocks out any bermuda (chokes it out) and both my neighbors have ugly bermuda weed messes for a lawn. But I do have a planter in between and the bermuda creeps over, under and other ways I question. I just yank as deep as I can the bermuda, and yes it does come back, but less and less every year, where its pretty simple to pull every couple of months.

As for my Marathon yard, I have noticed a few bermuda sprigs popping up around the edges, and I quickly yank them out. Hopefully, you dont also have nutsedge. I recommend after a year or two, buying some Marathon seed, and sprinkling it in areas that are looking a bit bald and some topsoil. It is a clumping grass, whereas bermuda is a spreading grass. I also dont cut it too short either.

But bermuda is the devil grass of california. If I can't control it, I will change my backyard to St. Augustine grass.