Advice needed - weeds!
rich83
Posts: 2
Hello all,
My fiance and I recently moved in to our first proper house and I am very excited by the prospect of getting in to the garden.
My first job was to sort the lawn out which will take some time yet, but after 1 month of hard work, it is recovering (the house had been empty for more than a year).
However, a problem I know have is with a large flower bed that borders one side of the garden. I begun to sort it out a month or so ago, taking as many weeds out as possible. We then popped a few small plants/flowers in, however there is a grass coming up and dwarfing them - no sooner have I spent hours taking the grass away (roots too where possible), just days later the grass is back.
I am now thinking I have three options, as the entire bed is full of weeds and plants I have no idea what they are. Also, there is a LOT of what can only be described as "straw-like" weed throughout.
Some pics:
Do I..?
1) Remove the small flowers I purchased and dig out the entire bed and get new soil?!
2) Remove flowers for safe keeping, dig out all weeds and then treat the bed with some sort of weed killer?
3) Remove our flowers and then try to use a membrane and re-plant through this?
Any advice welcome! Complete novice here, but an enthusiastic one.
Posts
I would dig out your plants, dig out the weeds and replant. You could mulch around your plants. If it come back again, 3) would be your option.
Your 3rd pic looks like you have wild strawberry. Unless you like them, and the fruits are tasty, take them out.
Depends if you want to use weedkiller or not? Some folk don't mind using it, some do.
I personally would use weedkiller simply because of the grass and what looks like bindweed (that's a horror to get rid of.. sorry to be such a bringer of doom!). Going back to the grass, it could be one of those grasses that will regrow if you leave a small bit of root in the soil, like couch grass. Good news is that glyphosate works very well on that, but it will pretty much kill any other plant it gets onto, so got to be careful! The other handy thing about glyphosate is that you can replant in a week or two without worrying about your new plants when you put them back in.
Enjoy your new home and garden
You have couch (cooch, kutch, other spellings available) grass. It spreads by long. strong white underground roots and unless you can remove every bit of root it will keep coming back. Even tiny bits left behind will regrow.
It would be best to remove and pot up your plants temporarily as it will take a while to deal with.
A membrane is not much use for a border where you want to keep adding plants or moving them around.
You could treat with a systemic weedkiller (Glyphosate)and leave it to do its work which takes a while. When all the grass seems to have died, wait a while longer to see if any reappears, as it may take more than one application to get it all.This is probably your best course of action as I think I can spot bindweed in there too.
Or you could dig very carefully and slowly, removing every bit of root you can see, then wait for the bits you missed to sprout and then weed them out too.
Whatever you do it will probably keep reappearing, as it will come under the fence from next door or under the flagstones from the lawn, but incursions are easier to keep on top of than a whole bed full!
I will get some Glysphosate and get cracking this weekend.
Rich
When you've treated the bed with glyphosate you must then leave the flippin' couch grass
until it is totally brown and dead - only then will the glyphosate have travelled through the plant to the roots and killed them. If you pull them up/dig them out before the top growth is totally dead then the roots will still be alive and any little bit left behind will regrow ................. and you'll have to do it all over again 
Good luck
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.