Sigh. If anyone has a suggestion, someone please post it?

Hybrid bermuda grass may be removed with lots of solarization, or with lots of work, or with lots of roundup, and with lots of vigilance. It's not quite as bad as nutgrass to get rid of.

If you have time, patience, hot sun, and clear plastic, you can water the bermuda grass area, cover the bermuda grass with the plastic, seal the edges of the plastic to the ground with heavy items to keep the water under the plastic as long as possible, and wait for several weeks until the bermuda is dead. This may or may not take all summer. July and August will be your friends if you are in North America. June might be helpfully hot, so might be September.

If you want the bermuda gone Now, get the ground soft enough with water that you can fork up clumps of dirt and bermuda. Remove the bermuda and its roots by sifting through the dirt with your hands so you can pick out every last sprig and root of bermuda. Put the bermuda into a plastic trash bag, tie the bag closed, cook the bermuda in the hot sun for several weeks, then you can put the dead roots into a compost heap. Or put it in the garbage and send it Away. Repeat every time a sprig of bermuda rears its green leaves. This is as close as you will get to removing the bermuda all at once. If you are very vigilant and very lucky, you may even get all the bermuda at one time.

Alternately, apply roundup to the bermuda and repeat the application every time a sprig of bermuda comes back from the roots. This takes less time than solarization, but takes more time than digging it out.

Heaven help you if you are trying to remove acres of the stuff, or if you are trying to keep desirable plants that the bermuda is growing amongst. If you are trying to remove acres of bermuda, then broadscale, repeated spraying of roundup on the bermuda would probably be less work than digging it out. Broadscale roundup spraying will devastate the local plant life as it kills the bermuda... If you are trying to keep desirable plants, wipe roundup gingerly on the bermuda with a sponge or cloth. If you are careful, you can apply roundup to the bermuda and avoid touching it to the desirable plants. Sometimes you can use water to wash the dirt away from the bermuda roots so you can get it out and disturb the desirable plants the least.

It will then be good policy to inspect your cleared area every few weeks for a year or two to make sure the bermuda stays gone.

Thanks for the advice. Some background: I dug up the bermuda with spade and shoulder, put down plastic, sprayed roundup . . . and the bermuda came back. I've planted native so cal plants in the yard, and they're doing alright . . . but the bermuda keeps creeping in . . . so I've been digging it out by hand (which is becoming an occupation), but I really would like to find a permanent solution to this roots/shoots/runners problem.

I removed a bermuda lawn from my entire yard, front and back. In my opinion, bermuda should be outlawed. Hate the stuff. John Greenlee, the native grass guru has it listed as a thug, one of the worst invaders. I agree.

In the front we scraped it off. A guy had this big machine re-doing the driveway and we had him scrape it clean off about 5" of dirt and grass. We brought in lots of sand to replace the dirt and mixed in, its really nice and easy to dig, a kind of well draining sandy loam now perfect for desert plants.

In the back, I sprayed roundup in late summer, using the big sized container with the spray nozzel and had to let it sit drab all winter. It died dead. No plastic or covering was necessary. You can tell when its dead by pulling out some of the grass and checking the roots. This worked very well for me. You have to do it while the grass is actively growing for it to work.

If you try to dig it, any roots or grass you accidentally bury will grow back so spraying roundup on un-dug-up grass is best. The green part of the grass has to be on top and growing for Round-up to work its way down to the roots.

I have dug the stuff too in the past putting in beds. I always had to stay on top of it for a while and cull out pieces that I had missed but usually got most of it. I always dug it up in neat rows taking out the grass as I went along, going down about 8 to 10 inches to get all the roots and digging up "plugs", shaking out roots and grass a shovel full at a time. If you don't do it like that, inevitably lots of grass and roots get buried.

We brought in tons of top soil and sand and covered it all in river rock. No lawn anywhere.

We now have a beautiful dry mesic landscape with cactus, agaves, desert shrubs/plants and native grasses.

I read about a product called Ornamec that is sold by Wildseed Farms. I found it locally at a local feed store & used it to kill the grass off a burm at the back of our property to prep it for a wildflower area. It worked like a charm but had to respray it this spring. It is considered to be an "over the top" grass killer. I am planning to expand a couple of other flower beds & plan on using it instead of hand digging it out like I've done in the past!

Here is a link that might be useful: Ornamec