For the last few years I have been blogging about Donna’s and my fight against that scourge of the garden, nut grass. For those of you that haven’t been keeping up Donna and I have been developing a fairly large front yard. As we get an area planted and start regular watering one of the things that comes up is nutgrass that has been dormant for probably 20 years or more.

The first area we developed is an area near out drive. Obviously, this is an area that I see as I get home in the evening, and my main line of attack has been hand pulling.  As I started weeding the amount of nutgrass dropped quickly and dramatically. Last year after two years of pulling it was coming back very sparsely and with out a lot of vigor. This spring I have seen a couple of sprigs and that is all.

Because of the amount of ground cover, flowers, flowers and perennials there. I couldn’t use things like Round-up or Remuda. I couldn’t use a hula hoe or regular hoe. It was a limited area and as I started the nutgrass re-growth reduced dramatically and quickly to just a few sprigs every few days.

This allowed me to keep up and ahead of it.

In the nursery where I have done hand weeding I have noticed the same result. There, unfortunately, I lost focus after a couple of months, and by the end of summer it was back just like it was before.

The key then is persistence.

You can use Remuda, Nutgrass-Nihalator or a garden hoe or Hula-Hoe to kill it. but the key is to keep after each sprig until it quits. If you leave one sprig eventually you will end up where you started. If it is just everywhere you have to start some where, use bulk controls until if gets down where hand weeding is not overwhelming and then stay after until is is gone and then don’t quit looking. Give it al least a year with out any  regrowth before you can relax.Good luck and keep gardening

PS: One of the tricks we used is a thick mulch over the soil. This doesn't stop nutgrass, but it does make getting the entire plant with hand weeding easier. In addition it does reduce seedling weeds, keep the soil moist and cool which  then lets the plants you want to grow do better.

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