Except for the asparagus crowns, which need to be planted as soon as possible before they dry out, all your seeds should be usable next year. The "December 2015" date is the last date they can be sold in the stores, so you still should get good germination from almost everything next year. You can further extend the seed viability by putting the seed packets in an air-tight container and storing the seed in your freezer. Just remember, though, when you remove the air-tight container from the freezer that you shouldn't open it up until the container comes to room temperatures. Most seeds remain viable for 3 to 5 years after their expiration date, but a few things (lettuce and carrots, for example) only remain viable with good germination for a year or two.

I've been fighting bermuda grass in my main veggie garden, the one that sits in the front pasture between the house/front yard and the roadway since moving here in 1999 so you have my sympathy. Because we started out with dense red clay that broke shovels and mattocks, it was extremely difficult to remove the bermuda grass for the first ten years. I just hand-dug it as much as I could during the growing season and used heavy mulch, often placed on top of landscape fabric or several layers of thick cardboard, to keep it from taking back every square inch of the garden. I still am fighting it, but with our soil having benefitted from over a decade and a half of amending, the soil is much more workable now so the grass is easier to dig out. Nowadays, it still tries to creep in and sneak in by coming through the garden fence in mid-summer when I am busy harvesting and canning, but I try to keep it out. Since it is too hot to dig at mid-summer and I am otherwise preoccupied with other pressing chores, I just yank out what I can and then drop a couple of layers of cardboard on top of it and put 4 to 6" of hay, straw or grass clippings on top of it. That often smothers it but doesn't kill it, but it keeps it from spreading most of the time. In the fall when I do garden clean up, I dig it out again. Every year I have less and less trouble with bermuda grass and Johnson grass invading the garden, so staying on top of it as much as possible as it regrows does help. The cardboard decomposes in a few months, but it works well as a temporary smothering device.

You have other options besides digging it out, though a lot of them might only knock it down and not kill it. Here's a few: smother it underneath landscape fabric or cardboard covered with a very thick layer of mulch. This can buy you time during the growing season, and often then if you lift up the smothering material in fall, all the stolons and runners are right on the soil surface and easy to pull out or dig out. You could cover the bermuda grass with a large sheet of clear plastic (preferably 6 mm thick so it is good and sturdy and does not tear easily) held down around the edges with bricks or lumber. If you do this, water it well and then cover it, and leave that plastic on for a couple of months, preferably in hot summer weather. At first the grass will grow, but eventually the summer sunshine and the greenhouse effect will kill it or weaken it significantly so that it is easier to remove. This is a process called solarization and it also is used to kill some soil-dwelling diseases or pests. You could spray the grass with a chemical grasskiller, which will be most effective if you wait until temperatures are in the 80s and the grass is quickly-growing. You might have to spray, wait a couple of weeks, watch for some of the grass to resprout and then spray again.

Or, you can plant your garden, using mulch on top of the pathways with either cardboard or landscape fabric underneath it to keep your paths grass-free. (Never let the bermuda root through the landscape fabric or you'll never be able to remove the fabric or the grass.) Rototill, plant your seeds or transplants, and then wait for the grass to regrow. At that point, buy an over-the-top herbicide labeled for use around broad-leaf plants. Generally these are most effective on bermuda grass that is under about 6" in height. As much as possible, spray only the grass and not the veggie, herb or flower plants, and don't spray veggies like corn that are in the grass family. On the product you buy, there will be a label that tells you which fruits and veggies will not be harmed by the over-the-top herbicide. Be sure you don't spray it on or near anything not on the "safe" list. The label also will tell you how many days you must wait until you can harvest edible crops from a garden sprayed by the over-the-top herbicide. It will list a specific number of days for each edible crop. While I do not like using any synthetic products in my garden, I think I would have simplified my garden's development and saved myself about a billion hours of digging out bermuda grass if I'd used an over-the-top herbicide in our first few years here. The one that I see most often in local feed stores that is in the right size for a home gardener to purchase and use is a Hi-Yield (Fertilome) product. I'll link it below.

Or, if you don't want to use a herbicide around edible crops at all, plant your new garden areas with flowers that are safe for use with the over-the-top herbicide and enjoy the flowers this year, while also spraying regularly, following label directions, to kill the bermuda grass that comes up around the flowers. Then, in the fall and winter, dig out any bermuda grass stolons and runners you can find. Then, cover the soil with clear plastic and solarize it all winter long. That should give you almost totally bermuda-grass-free garden beds for next year.

Or, you can be like me, and spend a significant portion of each growing season digging out the bermuda grass.

I think if I was starting from scratch, knowing what I now know about how vigorously bermuda grass will keep invading every year, I would have rented a sod cutter and taken out the bermuda grass that way first, or I would have sprayed the first couple of years with an over-the-top herbicide.

Generally, I feel like herbicides have absolutely no place in a veggie garden, but I'd make an exception for bermuda grass if I found it impossible to hand-dig and get it all out. When you rototill bermuda grass, every little piece of stolon that you do not remove will resprout. You only have to have one tiny 1/4" piece of stolon for every square yard and you'll get a full carpet of bermuda grass in one growing season. That's why it is so important to fight it aggressively. Raised beds help because their soil isn't walked on and the soil remains more loose and the bermuda grass is easier to dig out. However, what I found in my garden is that bermuda grass is sneaky and will grow underneath the boards used to edge the raised beds and then, when you are busy with other things, it sends off stolons all along that underneath-the-board growth and suddenly you have bermuda grass filling your raised beds.

Another method would be to use a small foam paint brush to paint a herbicide onto the grass only, which leaves less likelihood that herbicide drift would harm something you didn't mean to kill.

My favorite way to get rid of bermuda grass is to buy plugs of St. Augustine grass and plant the St. Augustine every few feet. With proper water, fertilization and mowing, the St. Augustine will out-compete the bermuda grass and crowd it out. That's how I got rid of an entire bermuda grass lawn in Fort Worth in the 1980s. Sadly, though, a person doesn't want an entire veggie, flower or herb garden filled with St. Augustine any more than they'd want those beds filled with bermuda grass.

Another idea which I've tried with some success, was to till an area while night time temps are still pretty cool and then, as early as is feasible, plant a good sturdy corn in that spot. I plant the corn somewhat densely and usually I plant cowpeas on the South, West and Eastern borders of the patch. This pretty well smothers the Bermuda grass and the parcel is much easier to work the following year.

I plant the corn in rows about 4' apart and cultivate and hill twice by the time the corn is 2' tall. After that, there's no stopping it and the Bermuda cannot compete. It is, however, important to plant a really sturdy corn. I doubt I would be able to accomplish the same thing with most sweet corns.

Another variation on the same scheme would be to plant the parcel in some very vigorous squash (c. moschata or c. agyrosperma). I have done this with Old Timey Cornfield Pumpkin. But there are others which would do the trick.

George

Sandhill Preservation Center Corns

Viable Bermuda grass roots have been found 30' down. I think there is really only one bermuda grass plant in the world and it sends out runners for thousands of miles. Now if we could just find it.

Honestly, I've thought the same thing draej!

Thanks George and Dawn for the helpful info.

You're welcome. There used to be a guy here somewhere on GardenWeb whose GW name was "bermudagrassisevil". Every time I saw it I would laugh because truer words were never said.

As much as I hate bermuda grass, I find it someone manageable with constant attention. The grass that really gives me trouble is Johnson grass. It is like bermuda grass on steroids.