Hi.

This is my first post here, and I look forward to reading your replies and to looking around the forum. Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated.

We have quite a large flowerbed in front of our house, which was professionally landscaped when our house was built back in 2001. Twice now, we have had landscapers come in and replace the mulch after removing the old mulch and laying down a weed killer (Preen one time; I'm not sure what they used the second time).

The bermuda grass and other grasses get worse every year! Pulling this grass is back-breaking work, as the flower bed is quite large, and the grass doesn't want to come out easily. Is there anything we can spray that will kill the grass (but not the bushes and other plants) and keep it from coming back?

I might add that we use Chemlawn for our lawn, and it is pretty much weed-free. Also, my husband has a tendency to let the grass-clippings blow over onto this flower bed when he mows, and he just leaves them there. I have suggested to him that this may be the problem, but he insists that, because the grass has not "gone to seed" before he cuts it, it couldn't be causing grass to come up. But I wonder. No one else in our neighborhood seems to have nearly as much trouble with weeds as we do, and I've noticed that most of them have a sidewalk or some sort of low wall separating their flower bed from their lawn, and I never see grass clippings lying on top of their mulch.

Again, any help is much appreciated.

Sandi

Thanks.

After I posted this this morning, my husband and I went outside and walked around, talking about what to do.

We've decided to do the following, in gradual steps over the course of the summer:

We've started removing the top layer of soil/mulch.

We're going to till the exposed ground and the ground around the plantings.

As soon as we finish tilling, we'll put down some type of weed/grass killer.

We're going to reduce the size of the flower bed by about half. The previous owners are the ones who planned the landscaping, and there is a vast amount of empty ground just sitting there with no plantings. We'll put down sod and make it part of the lawn.

We're going to build a brick retaining wall, going down several inches.

And I hope we can enjoy our yard a bit more next summer, :lol:.

Sandi

I can relate. We've been fighting it for three years, and I think you're right about the roots going to China, LOL.

I'm hoping the wall will at least reduce some of the runners, then maybe I can keep up with any that sneak in.