DH put in 3 raised beds for me 3 years ago. This is our third year and only minimal Bermuda grass coming through. Here is what he did. 1. Scalp the ground with the weed wacker down to dirt. 2. Lay down two layers of 10 year black weed blocker paper (water permeable). The bottom layer north to south and top layer east to west -and- he extended the paper about 3 inches outside the wood box. 3. Fill the beds (all 4x4) with potting mix and peat moss and all the old growing medium from our EarthBoxes. 4. During the summer and fall he regularly weed-wacks all around the raised beds to keep down any weeds in the area. The Bermuda grass has only rarely grown up thru the 10 inches of 'dirt' and I have no mulch around my okra, beans and squash. I plant collard greens in these same beds in fall and they stay until spring - still very, very few weeds. I credit the scalping DH does with weed-wacker for keeping the weeds from growing wild around the beds. I credit the weed-block paper for keeping the weeds almost completely out of the beds. DL

When you say Central Utah, I'm assuming you mean somewhere along the Wasatch front. Since you talk about a monthly water bill, I'm going to assume you're dealing with metered water rather than the unmetered irrigation water some areas have. That makes it tougher. You're fairly late to be seeding and hope to have a successful lawn this year, especially if you're going to be constrained in terms of watering. The problem is that since KBG takes 3 weeks or so to germinate, it's going to be early June before you see any KBG sprouting. If you buy a mix of KBG, rye and tall fescue, the rye and fescue will germinate sooner, but you still need to water several times a day until the KBG germinates. At that point, you can cut back to watering once a day for a week or two, then every other day (maybe, but since the grass is so young, you may need to water every day this summer). If I were you, I'd do what I could to keep it looking somewhat okay this summer, and dormant seed in the late fall/early winter. The problem with a "normal" late summer/early fall planting here is that if you wait for the heat to break, by the time you get the seed down, you've run out of time for the grass to establish before first frost. I've had good results putting seed down just before the first snowfall and letting them germinate in the spring when the soil warms enough. There's enough moisture naturally at that time (and only at that time) for the seeds to germinate without irrigation.

Hello Rod, I had the same problem, tried several different chemicals, none with success. Either they didn't kill the Kikuyu, or killed part of my lawn. However, eventually I did find a way. Firstly I bought Freezone Tuffweed, which contains a higher concentration of glyphosate than Roundup, which costs less and you only need a smaller quantity. I purchased a Weeding Brush, several different makes available, filled it with Tuffweed, and went onto the lawn, choosing an area to treat, and began stroking the brush along every Kikuyu runner I could see. As you push on the brush, it allows chemical to flow to the brush head, so you can target where your chemical is going far better than spraying, and you can do it even on a windy day! Once you have done it a few times, you can become quite good, and application gets more precise, so damage to your lawn or other plants becomes negligible. This kills the whole plant as it's systemic, from runner to root. It's the only way I know of killing Kikuyu permanently. Hope this is of benefit Rod.

Sorry, I seem to have missed your previous question as well. You could have seeded a bit, but would have lost a high percentage of the sprout during summer. Quarantine has totally borked my normal response to feeding this year. Normally I'd have gone to get soybean meal and fed around now or so, give or take. While the place I go to is open, it's not somewhere I need to go, therefore I didn't. I'm using Milorganite this spring, for about three-quarters of the feeding, and filling in with urea, and simply feeding right around Memorial Day to account for the fact that Milo is a faster nitrogen supply than soybean meal is. That's fine. I'll time it so that rain's expected within a reasonable time period to wash in the urea, and just enough to wash it in correctly (a quarter inch to somewhat more).