I have 12 flower beds in all, 4 huge, 3 medium sized and 5 tiny ones... One of the huge beds at the end of the yard I allow to grow wild. Mother Nature mostly cares for it, although I did plant a few things there to improve the variety, another peony, 2 bleeding hearts, a globe flower, 2 hostas and some lupins; and I do chop off the perennials in the fall, but leave a lot of dead material to hopefully turn to mulch and eventually improve the soil... or that is the theory, anyway!
There was soooo much grass and 3 foot/ meter long grass roots everywhere in the rest of the flower beds, mainly originating from the huge overgrown clumps of perennials in the middle, (maltese crosses , shasta daisies delphiniums, ) also a big current bush, and a potentilla shrub in the middle of one of the beds.
I decided the only way to deal with the problem head on was to dig up all the perennials, pull out the grass roots, and thin out the clumps of growth. With my husband's help we dug out 14 clumps of maltese cross from the large bed in the middle of the yard and put back 9 of them with spaces in between ( and a whole lot less grass!)
The other clumps of maltese cross plus a half dozen shasta daisy clumps are up for grabs! Guess I'll make up a sign for the post office bulletin board like in years past to see if I get any takers.
The lawn itself was also encroaching on the same bed and the grass was creeping in around, through and under the rocks on the perimeter. We rolled back all the rocks from around the edge and my energetic husband dug a 10 inch trench around the bed. He then cut pieces of boards and filled the trench with them. After that we cut 24 inch widths of black plastic and laid it in the trench with the sides extending into the flower bed and out onto the lawn for a few inches. Then we placed the rocks one by one back around the flower bed on top of the black plastic.
After that I filled the flower bed back in with soil from the pile beside the shed and with some "Sunshine Mix" from a local gardening place, shovelful by shovelful. (Who needs to go to the gym when you can get a free work out in your own back yard!?? LOL! )
Then I shoveled poplar mulch from the remainder of the huge 900 pound bag of same (which we had bought 2 summers ago) around the rocks onto the black plastic to hide it. Now there's a circle of mulch, a circle of rocks and then another circle of mulch around the entire bed with black plastic underneath to hopefully deter the grass.
We have tried black landscaping cloth in previous years, but it only really worked well the first year. After that it gave the grass roots a handy foothold to speed up their descent into the garden beds!
Did I mention that I did the same thing to my little step stone and moss pathway between the beds? I removed the stones and dug out all the grass and weeds trying to grow there. We cut a large piece of plastic the size of the path, cut holes where the Irish moss was growing and laid it down on the pathway. Then I placed all the step stones back on the black plastic and shoveled mulch in between the moss and stones on top of the plastic. (see photo.)The bad news is that I still have one more similar step stone walkway that needs the same attention....
I had gone to a meeting of the Buffalo Lake Naturalists last month and the guest speakers were from the Ellis Bird farm near here. The woman who looks after their entire gardens showed a power point presentation of how they 'built' their beds and that is how they solved some of their grass problems. Apparently the black plastic will kill all vegetation underneath it in about a year. Maybe it will kill the grass and dandelions trying to encroach on my flower bed! Or maybe it will just serve as a slippery slide for all the earthworms and insects in the early morning while we are still in our beds sleeping and not able to witness the fun they are having!
Or just a slippery spot to step on when exiting the flower bed after vigorous weeding! ( I may regret this...)
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