The Grass Doctor

Grass it taking over my flower bed, what can I do to get rid of it?

Apparantly the home builder that I bought my house from did not put down some kind of weed or grass guard underneath the soil where my flowers and hedges are. Now grass is completelly taking over the bed. It looks terrible, I pull it often but it grows so fast I cant keep up with it. I heard using a grass/weed killer in your flower bed will kill your shrubs, hedges, and flowers too. Is there any help for me?

Public Comments

1. They make specially designed grass killer that won't hurt your shrubs, hedges and flowers. Just look on the bottle and it should say if it is safe to use around other plants without killing them. They have them pretty much anywhere.
2. Be careful with any weed killers that you might spray like roundup. Do it on a windless day. I just turn over the soil once a week and I keep problems like that in check.
3. Get a herbiced that is shrub, tree, flower friendly. Spray it on the grass and wait a few days. use a hoe to chop up the grass or pull the dead grass out by hand. Just make sure to remove the roots thats the most important. Then add a new layer of mulch to the bed any just hoe or rack the bed often. Buy some Roundup but make sure it is selective to grass not non selective.
4. I say if any plant killers and weed killers don't work do it the old fashoind way. Get a shovel dig and pull out the grass if that does not help build a bridge and get over it.
5. Two things you can do. 1) There are grass herbicides that target grasses only. 2) Start from scratch. Take out the flowers. Lay down a weed barrier. Then, plant new flowers. You can lay the barrier around the shrubs, up to the stem.
6. Mine did that in 1 bed. I took the time to put in an edging around the bed. I did just a black thin edging, but you could do brick or stone or what ever matches your home, and then I cut and pulled all of the grass out and put in some new dirt and put mulch down. It cuts out on the weeds and looks very nice. No landscaping is ever maintenance free!!
7. Get yourself a scuffle hoe and clear the grass away where you don't want it. It looks like a metal stirrup on the end of a broomstick. You can buy it at any hardware store for about $15. The stirrup part is a blade. You just scuffle it across the ground and it clears whatever is in its path. So be careful around the plants you do want. Once you've got the grass cleared out, lay down landscape fabric ( weed block ) and cover it with mulch. Problem solved :) No more grass coming up in your flowerbeds.
8. You can try trimming the hedges underneath so you can see where the hedges start to come out of the ground. Then you can lay down several sheets of old newspaper around your hedges & flowers, place a 1-2 inch layer of mulch over the newspaper. The grass & weeds will die under the news paper.
9. Yes. Cut the bottom from a gallon or a half-gallon plastic milk container and remove the lid. Put the container down over what you want dead and spray round-up in the container through the top opening. This kills the grass/weeds without killing what you wish to keep. Just wet the foliage, but don't "drown" it. Do not water for 24 hours.
10. dig a trench arround your flower garden, this stops the grass from coming in, it worked with ours. please try it! ;)