Quackgrass, Couchgrass, Twitchgrass, Devil's Grass

Bought a house and property with this _everywhere_ and it is very difficult to remove. I have had to take my potato fork and shovel and d...Read Moreig it out manually, square foot by square foot (about 5-10 minutes per square foot where it is heavily established, which is mostly everywhere). Weed killer doesn't work well (it comes right back from the stolons), smothering with cardboard and inches of mulch doesn't work well (it pokes right through and spreads like wildfire when it hits sunlight if you leave it alone for 5 minutes, or miss a few of the initially small and wispy grassy leaves amongst your plants last time you weeded). I've read that it can grow up to 30 feet a season in ideal conditions. Doesn't surprise me a bit.

Unless you are obliterating an entire area _of everything_ with several applications of herbicide, or very aggressive smothering, or burning several times, all of which are reported to work, and which I can't do, as I'd already plunked in (sensitive!) garden plants before I realized what it was AND I have 2 children and pets I'd rather not expose to heavy concentrations of such chemicals.

Even with digging out every last stolon I can find I fully expect to have to pluck a few that I missed for years to come, as this comes back even from very small segments left in the ground as well as seeds, though slightly less aggressively when it is not so well established. This is going to be a years-long, possibly decades-long project of eradicating this plant.

On the positive side, it is supposed to have some medicinal uses, mostly having to do with the urinary tract from what I could gather.

An aggressive cool-season perennial grass with rhizomes that can spread several feet. The rhizome tips are sharp and yellow. Eradicatio...Read Moren can be accomplished by burning, chemical applications, or by removing the entire plant and roots.