Bermuda grass in my compost pile.

I have a small plot, 10'x10' that has been decomposing for almost 5 years.
I had some grass in it and tried to keep it clean. Today in OKC, the weather forced me outside.
The grass was worse than I thought. This plot is where the tomatoes will go so I can stake them on to the chain link fence. Is there any grass killer that can kill grass and not harm vegetables.
Thanks for any advice. I came across the prayer request forum an spent about an hour.
Very inspirational. prcastle

Cover the entire area with 6-8 layers of newspaper and then cover with about 3" or more of mulch, topsoil, whatever that you's use for the tomatoes anyway (DO IT NOW) and water it well to wet through the mulch to the newspapers. It will be ready when it's time to set out tomatoes.

Darius is right....I don't like to use chemicals where my food is being grown...I get enough of them even by trying to avoid them....I wouldn't knowingly add more.

The mulch and newspapers is a great idea. When it warms up a tad, you can 'solarize' a patch of ground too. Stretch a clear sheet of plastic over the area and secure it all around (landscape ties...etc)
The plastic will act like a little heat chamber with temps high enough to kill everything, seeds included.

The only problem is, you need to have your ground ready to plant to do this....by tilling it, you'll bring new grass seed to the top and they will sprout. Solarization works best for existing beds where you only scoop out what is needed for transplanting.

I agree with mulching, but I'm not convinced that 6-8 layers of newspaper will stand a chance against Bermudagrass. I use 20-30 layers (entire sections of the Wall Street Journal, overlapped and criss-crossed every which way), topped by several inches of shredded bark mulch for my paths and permanent beds, and over the course of a summer, even that will break down and the Bermuda rears its ugly head once again.

As ugly as this process is, if this is where I was planting tomatoes, and I didn't want to use Roundup AND I wanted to make sure bermuda wouldn't be a major pain all summer, I would till the area now and handpick out the bermuda rhizomes - every bit that you can find. THEN lay down your newspaper mulch and throw several inches of soil, compost, etc. on top. When the soil is good and warm, plant by digging a hole for each tomato, then use straw to mulch the soil and weaken any weed seedlings that germinate. (They'll be wimpy, pale things that can be plucked out easily.)

Deeproots (drew) recommends Poast as an effective, selective killer of Bermudagrass but I wasn't able to find it last summer and he warned me it is VERY expensive when you do find it.

I've been battling Burmudagrass since moving to the ranch. After searching for information on Burmudagrass, finding that roots can go down as much as 6 feet, I contacted a grass expert at Texas A&M extension. He wished me the best of luck and gave me the bad news. It's going to be a long hard battle because of Burmuda's long root system. Removing all the roots I could find worked for a very short time. I've had it pop up through several layers of landscape cloth and two sprayings with Round-Up. Solarizing won't work. The heat needed to kill the roots just doesn't go down 6 feet. As much as I hate to use herbicides in a vegetable garden, it's either use it or forget about that plot.

The good thing about Round-Up is that it is a translocator and does not react with the soil. I found there were other herbicides that control (not eradicate) Burmudagrass, but they are for ornamental use.

BettyDee

Don't forget, though, that prcastle said the plot has been decomposing for 5 years now...

The thing about RoundUp is that it has to actually touch the thing you want to kill and stay on it long enough to get down into the roots. The only real way to get rid of the Bermuda grass in the plot (in my opinion) is to saturate the entire plot with RoundUp, wait 2 weeks, till and then saturate again, wait two weeks and then water the area each day to dilute the RoundUp solution in the ground. RoundUp breaks down within the soil and quickly (relatively speaking) becomes completely harmless to flora and fauna. I'm sure if you did this intensive cycle of saturation with the RoundUp you'd get a great majority of the roots if not all. But you may not be able to get through the 2-3 cycles of saturation and waiting afterwards before you want to plant out your tomatos. The saturation method worked well for me, but I had a LONG wait until I could plant that patch of my garden. It was so completely overrun by countless varieties of very sutbborn weeds, some of which also have very very deep root systems. So I threw up my hands and just decided not to worry about when it got planted. The important thing was to get rid of those weeds before I planted so I wouldn't end up having them to battle and not be able to spray them for fear of killing my desired plants. After my 3 cycle saturation method and subsequent 2 month wait after the last saturation, I haven't had more than a handful of weeds come up in that entire area. And I'm sure those were planted either by birds or were windborn seeds after my treatment. But waiting the 2 months ensured that the plants I bought to put in there were not at all affected by the RoundUp as it was fully decomposed by that point.

I hope this helps. And just for the record, this is only my opinion. I'm no expert. Just recounting from my own experience.

-Julie

I've got Bermuda grass sprouting through a 4 inch layer of asphalt in my driveway...in January yet! getting rid of this stuff is going to be tough.....I can see it now, the nucular holocaust survivors....cockroaches, Cher and Bermuda grass.

I've even poured pure salt on the stuff.