Clear plastic secured with something that doesn't let rain in for 2-3 months.

I would just put cardboard + wood chip for walkways, and weed periodically. You just have got to pull weeds once in a while.

IME Bermuda is impossible to totally eliminate, even weed killers don't get rid of it permanently. So multiple layers of cardboard topped with chips for the paths between beds is the best I have come up with. In the beds themselves - heavy duty weed pulling. A PITB I know but the only other effective alternative is pouring concrete over it. :)

Dave

My beds are surrounded by grass or clover.

I use white clover on many paths - it makes a great walkable groundcover, however the bees like it too when its flowering. It's not going to outcompete rhizomatous grass though.

Whether you have grass or clover you will have to edge your beds every year. Though you can add clover to the beds and I wouldn't add the grass to the beds.

Personally, I think the easiest thing to do is to leave the grass and commit to edging it every year. You'd have to weed the beds, but you do that anyway right? If you mulched the PATHS you'd have to edge them *and* weed them every year. More area to weed, no thanks. :)

For ground covers there is a site called stepables. I have lost the site due to a change in computers, but could be found. Nancy

You could line the inside bottom of the bed walls with plastic after you dig out the Bermuda in the beds. That'll slow down the Bermuda invasion from the outside. But yes, Bermuda is mostly unstoppable.

you've gotten great advice above, so here's the encouragement -- first, it looks like you've made great progress, second it's really not very late in the planting season yet especially for zone 5, so you've still got plenty of time for a great garden.

I didn't know anything about quack grass (also a rhizome spreader) when I first started gardening in a new area, and one early year I spread manure, then newspaper, then a thick layer of hay over the whole garden, expecting to come back after some weeks away in May to perfect soil ready to plant in. Instead I came back to a garden of hip high quack grass (It loved the manure and mulch!). If I could dig out 1600 square feet of quack grass, you can do this!! (and, um, yes seven years later I'm still digging every spring -- but much less than before. Bermuda and Quack cause digging -- just a fact of life.)

You can put heavy duty black plastic sheets in the walkways and gravel or rocks on top. You can also cover the beds with black plastic sheets and heat kill all the grass, but it'll take at least 2 weeks. In autumn you can dig your beds and turn the big chunks of soil upside down. The freezing temperatures will kill the exposed roots and loosen the soil. And there is always an option to dig and manually remove all the roots, and to be very vigilant about removing all the growth and roots whenever you see it.

use those in-ground landscape dividers. By being at least a few inches deep, it helps (but not totally stops) the spread of those roots. Also, your walkways can be different material than just soil topped with something. For example, those crushed granite walk ways are pretty good and not letting things grow, or at least, not letting them spread so fast that you can't control it.

Most people just want to kill weeds but there are times you want to kill grass, too, such as on patios and walkways. There are those kinds of products if you're not averse to using them. It won't kill all of them all the time but you just need to get it to a manageable level where manual weeding can be used.

As for the long-term, you do have to keep doing this for many years, continually refusing to let the grass get a foot hold. My parents' garden area is in total regular top soil - no raised bed or walkways. It only dawned on me last year that I see no grass growth there at all. It is all veggies and bare soil (where they walk).

It now being June, I'm curious to know if you've gotten anything planted this year...

I got this far just this weekend - tomatoes in, and peppers in the front yard where I didn't take a pic :-). All of my seeds, though, are just barely started, and no lettuce or greens at all this year until the fall. Overall, though, better than my worst fears. I haven't figured out what to do permanently with the walkways yet, and of course the weeds are starting to grow back in there, so I need to hurry with those. Starting this fall, I'd like to begin replacing the bottoms of the beds one by one with some heavy plastic, I think that would help too. Thanks for your curiosity, it's nice to hear back!

If you line the bottom of the beds with plastic, how will they drain rapidly?

Thank you, rhizo. I am humbly reminded of why I shouldn't make decisions before my first cup of coffee. :-) No plastic liners for me, and still no long-term answer to the bermuda grass.