Good Morning from Arkansas!

skayt

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Recently retired I am moving from a suburban "Homestead" where I have been gardening using raised beds, gro bags and sip tubs plus a 8x16 Yoder-Built Greenhouse. I am in the process of moving to a rural place that has a large fenced garden spot that I am super excited about. Planning to move my greenhouse and the tubs and gro bags to this new location. The garden spot has not been in production in years and is covered with bermuda grass which will be challenging for in-ground gardening so I am researching all the best ways to get started with the process of eradicating the grass. I figure on dividing the plot into quadrants and covering an area to place my existing bags and tubs. So happy to find this site as well as the Back Yard Chickens group for I will now be able to have chickens and ducks! So here goes!!!!
 

baymule

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Welcome to the forum! If you haven’t already done so, please put your general location in your avatar. (I can’t tell on my phone) I’ll never remember where you are and it helps if you need advice.

Bermuda! Best horse/cattle grass for the South. Worst grass to have in your garden! Short of covering with concrete or a nothing gets out alive poison, it will be an on going battle.

Till it all under! Yeah, right. Tilling buries it deeper, breaks it into a zillion little pieces, each one of which sprouts back our 3 times, maybe 5 times. :lol:

Cover it with weed cloth! Get the heaviest stuff you can find. Bermuda will send out sub terrainium runners to the tiny speck of light that your seed start, precious tiny heritage garden plant that you grew with your own hands in your greenhouse, is struggling to get established in, put out roots, new leaves and flourish. Then Bermuda shows up. It puts all it’s effort and apocalyptic energy into that one tiny spot and overnight, is a jungle by morning. Where is my precious baby??? You exclaim in horror! :lol::lol:

How am I doing? Do I have a good description of Bermuda going on here for the uninitiated? Haha

More seriously, at my previous garden, I turned feeder pigs in the garden spot over the winter. They did a fine job of rooting up a lot of stuff. Then the battle began. Found a nursery that sold pumpkins in the fall. Pumpkins ship in triple thick boxes. So do watermelons. Get cardboard, cover the garden, lay out heavy weed cloth, and it will help keep the Bermuda down.

I moved to a new place in August. My garden will be in cattle syrup lick tubs this year. I have to clean fence rows, tear down old fence and put up new fence. But soon I will be battling the Bermuda too.
 

flowerbug

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welcome to TEG from mid-Michigan. i don't have bermuda grass to contend with but there's some quack grass i wish weren't so aggressive - takes a few seasons of dedicated and consistent efforts to eradicate from an area.

the above mentioned cardboard under weed barrier cloth method does work, but make sure to use a few overlapping layers of cardboard and then mulch over the weed barrier as that will eliminate light signals from getting through.
 

Branching Out

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Welcome Skayt! Good chance that your gardening game will go nowhere but up, now that you are retired. Just think of how much time you will have to focus on the important things in life-- like seeds, and how to grow new and exciting plants.
 

Ridgerunner

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Welcome to the forum from Louisiana, glad you joined.

I used to live in the Northwest corner of Arkansas outside of Fayetteville before I moved down here. Baymule and others probably still remember the bellyaching I did about Bermuda while there. Bermuda is great as a lawn grass, for pastures, and some varieties are great for hay. But yes, a pain in the garden. If you ever get rid of it don't let it get established again, it will try. I established a 5' wide boundary between the bermuda field and the garden with aluminum roofing that blew off of a loafing shed in one of our 70 mile an hour straight line winds or cardboard. It kept sending runners under that five feet to try to sneak back into the garden. Nasty stuff.

As Bay kind of said, do not till it, that just helps it spread. I got a neighbor to turn the soil with a turning plow to get it well underground when I started the garden. That did not eliminate it but it did set it back quite a bit, at least to the point I could keep it beat back if I were diligent on taking it out when I spotted it. It's not just the runners, the wind will blow in seeds, especially when you are mowing it. And here are already a lot of seeds in the ground.

I mulched a lot. That did a pretty good job of keeping it down. I left a lot of mulch on parts of it over winter, that made it a lot easier to clean up in the spring. I tried smothering it with cardboard to set up a strawberry patch. That helped a lot but I still had to clean up a bunch or runners that grew under it.

We make Bermuda sound horrible, mainly because it is when it is in the garden. It will take work but you can manage it. Best of luck and once again, :frow
 

Marie2020

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At least you have grass these have eaten every single blade off my back garden grass. Shall I send them to you 🤔
20230104_124609.jpg



Seriously welcome to BYC ;) .
 
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baymule

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At least you have grass these have eaten every single blade of my back garden grass. Shall I send them to you 🤔
View attachment 54422


Seriously welcome to BYC ;) .
Brilliant! Get 200 hens and turn them in the garden! They will scratch up grass and weeds, poop all over the place and maybe, just maybe, get the Bermuda down enough to smother it out as described above. :ya
 

skayt

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West Central Arkansas in the Ouachita Mtns Zone 7B
Recently retired I am moving from a suburban "Homestead" where I have been gardening using raised beds, gro bags and sip tubs plus a 8x16 Yoder-Built Greenhouse. I am in the process of moving to a rural place that has a large fenced garden spot that I am super excited about. Planning to move my greenhouse and the tubs and gro bags to this new location. The garden spot has not been in production in years and is covered with bermuda grass which will be challenging for in-ground gardening so I am researching all the best ways to get started with the process of eradicating the grass. I figure on dividing the plot into quadrants and covering an area to place my existing bags and tubs. So happy to find this site as well as the Back Yard Chickens group for I will now be able to have chickens and ducks! So here goes!!!!
Hey y'all thanks so much for the replies! [Haven't figured out just where to type in my location to show up on the avatar but I'll figure it out.] -- [and by the way this laptop is extremely touchy and finicky so if some of my words are wonky it may be because of that] I live in the Ouachita mountains of western Arkansas zone 7B.
Thankfully the man who always did our mowing and landscaping in town was able to take on the job of moving all my garden stuff out to the new place. He's made trip after trip hauling my tubs and fencing that I had there. My next step is to get the weed barrier cloth ordered and the mulch to cover it so that I can at least get all the tubs and gro bags in order. I've also been packing up my house to move and whew! that's a chore. I'd much rather be outside.
I had a feeling that tilling would just create more problems. I need to go around town and find cardboard to put down also. My In-laws back in the day had humongous gardens and a Cub tractor to work the ground. They produced bountiful crops and my mother-in-law was an expert at preserving it all. My hubby however was thoroughly burned out of gardening since he had grown up having to work their garden and since my folks never raised a garden I was a complete newbie to it all. In recent years though gardening has really become a big part of my life.
Yes the chickens are a great idea and I'm planning to set up a chicken yard and coop as soon as possible. My daughter has several pot belly pigs at her place, maybe I can have them come over and visit.....
 

baymule

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I had a chicken coop in the garden, just for fall/winter to let the hens range, eat Garden leftovers, scratch up bugs and enjoy them selves.
That won’t work with weed cloth!

Don’t be in a hurry to plant the garden. It’s going to take awhile to just beat back the Bermuda grass. Mow it as close as possible before the cardboard and weed cloth.

Moving! Packing! AAARRRGGHHH!
 

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