The finest-ground and thus for this purpose most useful ground bark is labeled "soil conditioner" at the garden centers. Here it is a bit less than $3 per 2-cubic-foot bag. I'll bet I have used 100 bags in the past several years and have seen no apparent problems.

For many years I had no source of good inexpensive mulch and never enough home-made compost so once or twice a year I mixed my compost with sawdust and shavings (likely a mix of hard and soft woods) from a local mill. I used our cement mixer to more easily and thoroughly mix this and added various other ingredients depending on what was available such as old manure, leftover spent potting soil, and whatever type of nitrogen rich supplement I had such as blood meal or various seed meals. I also always used alfalfa pellets which dissolve fairly quickly in water in the cement mixer and I believe helped to color the sawdust. I always used this as mulch, never mixed it with soil. It was a good way to extend and more evenly apply my meager supply of compost and the finished product looked better than pale sawdust. I found that if I didn't use it right away the pile would quickly start to heat and sometimes I left it awhile before using. However used as mulch there were no negatives and it greatly improved my soil over the years. You may find the addition of compost to the mulch will cause it to decompose faster but that IMO is not a drawback.

For compost, especially south of Carrboro, I would suggest semi-aged cow manure with bedding from Clark Farms which is south of Siler City. They have 2000 head of cattle and need to get rid of the stuff. They grind it and pile it for awhile and a friend of theirs has a Tandem dump truck (15-20 cu yards)who will deliver. They charge $50/load and their friend Gerald charges me $60 for delivery to near Silk Hope (20mi) You would probably be half again as far ($20-30 more??). That is still probably much cheaper than you would find elsewhere for terrific compost. I have taken 2 loads two times. The first time gave quite a barnyard smell for a week and needed a month more curing but the second lot was more completely composted. Obviously heavy on nitrogen and grew huge squash plants that ate my tomatoes that I thought were safely distant, and grew a great lawn on a red clay ditch where grass won't grow at all alone. I still have some and it grew no weeds from the pile. Of course it is a perfect medium for weeds in your garden and won't do as mulch. Gilbert and Doug Clark 919 742-3818

Brian, That sounds like a winner of a plan and I hope you'll keep us posted on how it goes! One thing (one of a million) that I learned from the great Texas gardening guru Neil Sperry was that bermuda was more aggressive than a person could even imagine. I read his gardening columns in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram from the very first day he started writing them when I was in high school, I listened to his radio Q&A type gardening show for many years, I bought his books, subscribed to his magazine, etc. and really tried to soak up everything he said. When I was young and foolish and thought I knew more than I did about gardening, I questioned (to myself) his statements that, if you rototilled up bermuda grass, it would completely regrow and recover the area in just a couple of months if you left so much as one quarter-inch- long piece of stolon every 3 feet. I just didn't think it could regrow and take back an area that quickly from such tiny pieces. Ha! In fact, HA! HA! He was oh-so-right and I was oh-so-wrong, but I had to see it for myself to believe it. And, for what it is worth, everybody I've ever known has had the exact same experience with Bermuda grass that you did during their first attempt at gardening in an area formerly occupied by Bermuda grass. So, I guess we gardeners at this forum can consider the battle with Bermuda a "rite of passage" that all southern gardeners must undergo. And, if you survive that "rite of passage" then you, too, get to be a gardener. Amanda, Actually, the best option would be to move someplace like Minnesota or Alaska where bermuda grass can't grow. Assuming that moving to a different state is not an option, then the best option is to do whatever you can to get every piece of bermuda root and stolon out of your existing soil. THEN, lay down a layer, preferably a double layer of cardboard on the ground. If you can get very large pieces like furniture boxes or applicance boxes, they'd be best because you'll have fewer "openings" in between pieces of cardboard where bermuda grass WILL find their way up through those openings. If you have to overlap smaller pieces of cardboard, overlap them by several inches. Build your beds on top of the cardboard, and if possible have the bed edgings sitting on the cardboard with several inches of cardboard extending beyond the bed. That way, whatever grass sprouts outside the beds is still several inches away from them and that gives you a chance to dig it out before it climbs into the bed. Fill your beds with your growing mix. If you can buy in bulk or have a dumptruck load of soil/compost mix delivered, that is much more economical than going to the stores and buying it by the bag. Once your growing mix is in place, buy a roll of fabric landscape mulch. You want the one that looks woven--it sort of resembles the appearance of felt. You DO NOT want the less-expensive one that says it has tiny perforated holes to allow water to flow down into the soil because it also allows bermuda grass to grow up through all those little holes. Use pegs or landscape staples to hold down that fabric. Cut holes in the fabric. transplant your plants through those holes, water in the plants, put fine bark mulch or clean (seed-free) straw on top of the mulch and you're done. But, you're not really done. Even with the cardboard on the bottom and the landscape fabric on the top, you'll still have bermuda grass trying to grow in your beds 24/7. So, watch for it religiously, and remove it the instant you see it. You CANNOT pull it up because if you try to pull it, you'll get the top but the roots and stolons will remain under ground and resprout within days. You'll have to dig it out. Do I like using landscape fabric in a vegetable garden? No. It is expensive and it limits what you can grow. Obviously if you want to direct sow anything in a bed, you cannot use the landscape fabric. In the beds where I have landscape fabric, though, I have very few weeds at all and that is important to me because I have a very large garden and I cannot spend hours every day digging out bermuda grass. In the beds, like the onion bed or the carrot bed, where I cannot use landscape fabric, I have about 10 times as many weeds. So, if you want to know the best way, in my opinion it is: 1) remove all the Bermuda you can find first, 2) put down a heavy cardboard barrier on top of the ground from which the bermuda grass was removed, 3) build the bed, 4) fill the bed, 5) put down a barrier on top of the bed, 6) cut holes through that barrier and plant, 7) water the plants, 8) mulch the plants, and 9) check your bed every single day for bermuda grass and remove each sprout the minute you see it. Using the above methods, I keep a very large garden pretty much bermuda grass free. Am I 100% successful in keeping the bermuda out? Heck, no. Every year, though, I have less and less trouble with the bermuda in the established beds, so I am making progress. Beginning gardeners tend to break up a large area of ground and then fail to maintain it properly. As the bermuda grass invades and "takes back" the area, the beginning gardeners become discouraged and give up gardening in what was, after all, not a fair fight. Bermuda is much more experienced at fighting for every inch of ground than you are, so my advice is to go slow. Build 1 or 2 small to medium-sized raised beds, even if you'd rather have 10 large ones. Look at your first year as a learning process and part of that process is learning how to keep the bermuda out of and away from your garden. Once you master keeping the 1 or 2 beds bermuda-free, then build new beds. You could build a new bed or two every year until you have as many as you need. There's a saying many gardeners use in reference to gardening that goes like this: "It all starts with the soil." I agree with the truth in that statement--with good soil you'll have a good garden and without good soil, you will not have a good garden. However, there is a more important saying that applies to southern gardeners and that is "Get rid of all the bermuda first and keep it out!" Because, you know what.....bermuda grass loves good soil and wants that soil, so your good soil is only worthwhile to you if you keep the bermuda grass out of it. I'm not trying to be discouraging--it is just that nothing drives new gardeners out of gardening more quickly than bermuda grass. Even an experienced gardener who has gardened for many years just finds themselves overwhelmed during their first "bermuda grass experience". So, learning to manage that bermuda grass is probably the most important "garden lesson" you'll ever learn. No topic that we discuss here on this forum gets more of a response than bermuda grass, and I've never seen a single person come on here and say "Oh, I have bermuda grass and it is not that bad." Bermuda grass in general, and tif bermuda types in particular, make lovely lawns. However, bermuda grass is not content to be merely a lawn--it wants to rule the world. So, as long as you understand what you're up against, you're likely to have better success. I have seen some gardeners near me rototill or dig up a veggie plot every year. They prepare the soil in Feb. and March, they plant in March and April, then they start seeing bermuda grass moving back into the veggie garden soil in late May. By late June the bermuda grass covers most of the garden. By mid- to late- July the gardeners have abandoned the garden, worn out by trying to fight the bermuda. The next year they do the same thing. Then, the next year they do it again. They say they "never have much produce to show for all the work they do". Well, the problem isn't that they don't work in their garden, the problem is that they don't do the right things to keep the bermuda grass out. So, it is your choice, but I hope you'll make better choices than these folks that I see start over from scratch every year. If I were them, I'd try a new game plan because the one they've used for 8 or so years now just isn't working. On the other hand, they have a really healthy stand of bermuda grass in their vegetable garden. Trust me--you do not want to be that type of gardener because the frustration is enormous. Good luck with your new beds. Keep us posted on how it goes. Dawn