How to Eliminate Grass in Your Garden: 5 Solutions
Grass in your garden can reduce yields by 80%. We’ve really struggled with grass in our current vegetable garden. Find out what we tried, what worked and what didn’t!
Grass in Your Garden
Few things are more frustrating than weeds in your garden, but most weeds are a breeze to deal with compared to grass! This is especially true of rhizomatous grasses such as quack grass.
In our case, a neighbor planted a very resilient rhizomatous grass in his pasture, which happens to share the fence line with our garden. When we started a garden there, little did we know what a nightmare the grass could really be.
How to Get Rid of Grass in Your Garden
1: Use a thick organic mulch such as hay
2: Cover the entire area in overlapping cardboard. Put 3″ or more of finished compost on top of the cardboard and plant right into it. You can leave the walkways as cardboard or use another material such as wood chips.
3: This is the most effective for stubborn pasture grass in your garden. Till the ground and lay down heavy duty landscape fabric over the entire garden. Anchor the sides of the fabric and cut or burn holes for each plant.
4: Use an area with a grass problem as the spot for your compost pile. A typical 4′ tall pile of compost will effectively smother out grass in a few months. I’ve had good success with this for smaller areas.
5: Use animals. Animals that tend to root in the soil such as pigs or chickens are excellent for eliminating grass in your garden. Leave them on the area for at least a few months. An entire season is better.
Gardening with Hay
The first year, we tilled the garden area to break up the soil. Once the plants started coming up, we surrounded them with a thick hay mulch. This is the Ruth Stout method and I have a blog post all about it here.
The old, unsprayed hay was free and easy to put down. It added lots of organic matter to our sandy, rocky soil, suppressed at least 90% of the weeds, and had more nutrients than straw. Our plants grew well and we had a good harvest that year, especially of root crops.
By the end of that first season, there was a little grass creeping in from the neighbor’s pasture, but it was manageable. Unfortunately the following spring the hay had halfway decomposed. The soil was looking great and there were earthworms everywhere when there had hardly been any before. But the grass exploded before I could put more hay on. I removed the hay from some spots and tilled them again, but this just broke up the long grass roots into more grass plants.
We also found that having hay over the soil before the plants started growing kept the soil from warming up in our cold pocket here in Montana.
I still really like the Ruth Stout gardening method and would absolutely do it again, especially to build new soil quickly and cheaply. But it just didn’t work well in this garden spot, between the cold and our grass problem.
Using Cardboard for Weed Free Garden Beds
The next year we raked off the hay and used the Charles Dowding method over most of the garden. We’d used it in smaller areas before with good success. This is a great way to get rid of weeds and less vigorous grass in your garden.
Overlapped cardboard was laid down over the whole garden, with several inches of finished compost piled on top. Seeds we planted straight into the compost, while we poked a hole through the cardboard for transplants.
This method was tons of work and took a couple months to complete. I probably shoveled 14 pickup loads of compost, from our animals and from free craigslist ads (always test for herbicide residue!). It looked great at the start of the season. Unfortunately, once the cardboard started to desinigrate, it was no match for the hardy grass roots, which started poking their way through in thousands of places.
By the end of the season, my beautiful garden was full of grass again.
I would use this gardening method again, but not in an area with thick grass. It works better with less vigorous weeds, or with lawn grass.
Using Landscape Fabric to Get Rid of Grass in the Garden
The third method to eliminate grass in your garden is to use landscaping fabric.
This year, we were expecting a new baby in May, right at the start of planting season. We knew we wouldn’t have much time to deal with grass in the garden.
We decided to put down landscape fabric over the main garden area, poking holes where each plant was to grow.
Plants that were closer together such as carrots, beets, parsnips, radishes and most of our salad greens went in a different area in raised beds. The plants with wider spacings all went straight into the landscape fabric, including squash, cucumbers, melons, beans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, cauliflower, kohlrabi and celery.
The area where we put down the landscaping fabric was about 50’x60′, and the 5 year fabric cost $190 (you can buy smaller rolls for a smaller area).
To make holes in the landscape fabric, a $20 propane torch works great, but you need a template to keep the torch from melting all the fabric. You can make a template by cutting holes in a piece of plywood at the spacings you will want for your plants. With plywood at $80 a sheet right now, we opted to just cut holes in the fabric with a knife.
The landscape fabric worked incredibly well to eliminate most of the grass in the garden. All the organic matter I had added over the past few years had made nice, rich soil, but I hadn’t had good plant growth because of all the grass competition. Getting rid of grass made all the difference and my garden has really exploded in growth this summer!
You can find the landscape fabric I used here on eBay.
More Ways to Get Rid of Grass in Your Garden
Another way I’ve gotten rid of grass in my garden is by using grassy areas for my compost pile. The area pictured below was thick grass until I put a few truckloads of unfinished compost on it last year. By the time the compost was finished two months later, the grass had all been permanently smothered out.
The area had a few weeds this year, but for the most part is still grass free after a year and a half.
One more way I have eliminated grass in my garden is with animals. This works best with pigs or chickens, which both root in the soil and dig up the grass, and typically don’t have grass seeds in their manure. If you have some time, putting animals in a new garden spot for a few months to a year is an easy way to get rid of grass in your garden and fertilize the soil!
Have you found another organic method for getting rid of grass in your garden? Please share in the comments!
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