How about some GREEN MULCH? right now I have lettuce, chards, onions(for greens) between my tomato/eggplant/pepper plants. So by the time the toms are grown those vegies will be gone. Yet I have a permanent green mulch idea: FENUGREE. i have tried clover but did not work. But fenugreeg ( from alfalfa family) iworks fine. More than anything else, it is also a green manure. Fenugreeg produces nitrogen by its roots(like some beans) so instead of gettinh nutient out , it ads free nitrogen that it gets from air. What's more, its seeds and gree are edible and medicinal too. You can buy the seeds real cheap from any Indo-Pakistany grocery store by the pound. Indians, chinese..use fenugreek and seeds in cooking extensivly....

I'm on year 5 now of a heavily-overseeded lawn with the Dutch White, and I haven't seen any problems yet with it choking out anything. Lawn stays green, no fertilizer needed, I return 2/3's of the clippings, and its like walking on a padded floor. I can't find anything good right now, but I based this on the concept of New Zealand pasture management, where a combination of earth worms, clover, and grasses combine for some of the the most productive pasture around. Right now, if I look out the window, there are at least a dozen robins hunting worms. But then again I live in a high desert where it rarely rains, and all this is on irrigation water, a different ecosystem all together.

Bermuda grass is not the only type of grass that can create these sorts of "weed" problems, although it does have a reputation for being one of the worst. A great many other common turf grass species can display this trait. Turf grasses come in three different growth habits -- clumpers, rhizomatous and stoloniferous -- and most common lawn blends, both warm and cool season grasses, combine a variety of both. Bentgrass, Kentucky blue and creeping ryegrass -- all of which are common to various cool season grass mixtures -- are either rhizomatous or stoloniferous and can create rooting, weedy problems when applied as a mulch to a planting bed. There are a number of other various grass species as well that will create similar issues. Bermuda and Zoisya grass are well known for this problem as well and they tend to be used most often in warmer climates (warm season grasses) and often as a single species rather than as part of a blend of various turf grasses.

Around here we usually have some leaves on the ground at garlic planting time. These get mowed in with the grass clippings. If not, I'll bust a bale of straw and spread some around (near the garden) before I mow. Then I use this 'mixture' for the mulch. The leaves and/or straw tend to reduce (at least in my experience) the possible matting of grass alone.