Yes. Like urinating on a spot in the grass. Too much nitrogen kills, but if it isn't gone or diminished by spring, your vegetable plants might not grow either. It might work, but if you're dependent upon that spot, I wouldn't try it. Adding nitrogen to the soil to overwinter is not uncommon, in fact it is encouraged to do, so the nitrogen will be more readily available for the plants in the spring.

The question is, how much nitrogen? If you need enough to kill the weeds, it might be too much and change the pH of the soil and all. I'm not sure how much.

Perhaps someone else can chime in.

tdsmith,

Did you put the nitrogen on the soil already?

No I haven't applied it yet. I have always dug the soil and pulled the bermuda roots out when making a flower bed but my son has a large area marked off for a vegetable garden and he said he isn't going to fish out all the bermuda after tilling.

Well then, if he isn't going to fish out all the bermuda after tilling there's no point in even attempting to garden. If you leave even a 1/4" piece of bermuda stolon in every square yard of rototilled garden space, the bermuda will come back and take over the whole garden after just a couple of months of warm summer weather. I see this happen to people near me every year. They plow, they plant, they don't bother weeding much if at all, and by June, their garden has totally returned to bermuda grass and Johnson grass, and they've abandoned the garden because the grass is winning the war and they don't want to deal with it. I say this as a lifelong gardener who fights year in and year out to keep all the bermuda out of the garden organically by hand-digging it, smothering it with cardboard and mulch, etc. It is a lot of work and seldom 100% successful, but it is the only option I feel comfortable using.

As for the use of ammonium nitrate to burn it out chemically, I've never tried and I wouldn't want to try it. I think that it would have to be used at such a high concentration that the residue left in the soil would make it impossible to grow a healthy garden there. How long the residue would last in the soil depends on a lot of variables including how much rain falls, how much he irrigates, etc. and he'd need to wash away/leach away all that excess nitrogen before he could even plant, except maybe for some high nitrogen users like sweet corn or onions. Then there's the whole issue of where the ammonium nitrate goes when it leaches away. Into ground water that might provide some people's drinking water? Into nearby waterways?

There are chemical grass killers he can use. I don't use them so don't know the names of the ones currently in use, but some of them work pretty well. However, even if they wipe out all the grass before he plants, they aren't a permanent solution. All gardeners know how quickly bermuda comes back, especially since it can spread from seeds as well as bits of roots and stolons.

And, finally, none of us should recommend this type of thing because chemical lawn and garden products are supposed to be used for their labeled purpose and it is against the law to use them "off label"......not that there's any lawn and garden police who are going to come after us for saying "sure, go ahead and try it". : )

When he tills it, the roots will be severed. Each new root will grow a new plant. Bermuda is evil.

I agree! Bermuda is a curse. I've always had good luck pulling out all the roots and I only go down a couple feet but a lot of mulch helps. You know how some people's kids are. They learn from experience only, the hard way. I don't know who told him this trick but I'm afraid it was a girlfriend. I'll make her come maintain the garden.

you're right. Mulch helps. Bermuda is a sun-lover. Johnson grass, on the other hand ....

Have him research lasagna gardening. There is no cure for bermuda, but this seems to be the least painfull way to start a garden. Still have to pull bermuda.

Thanks to all of you. I knew there was a good reason I never heard of that method of clearing bermuda for a garden plot.

You know that if there was such an easy way to remove bermuda, all of us would have found it by now! And, I agree with you. Some folks just have to learn things the hard way.

Someone on another thread mentioned they were going to plant something where their chicken coop had been. The grass and weeds had not yet returned. That may be the easiest way to clear a spot. I don't think the Bermuda is gone forever. If you WANT grass, something like a kiddie pool sitting in the same place for a few days will leave a bare spot (and at my house that fills in with weeds, not grass.) I haven't had chickens long enough to know if they kill the grass or just keep it scratched up. I have read that pigs root out all roots and such where they are penned. Not an option here.

Even where chickens have turned the ground into bare soil, it won't stay bare long. If it is a sunny spot, bermuda grass creeps in. If it is a shady spot, weeds pop up. I've seen bermuda grass sprigs pop up in cracks in sidewalks and concrete patios. If there is a way to grow anywhere, bermuda grass will find it. That's why gardening here is so hard. If we didn't have bermuda grass, we'd have so much more time to spend on other stuff. Instead, we spend far too much time removing the bermuda grass in the first place, and then fighting forever after to keep it out. However, I will say that it is easier and easier every year to keep it out as long as I stay on top of it. If you ever slack off and let the bermuda grass invade and come back, though, and you lose control of it, then in one summer you can undo all the good work you've done to keep it out for many years, and the battle starts all over again.

A few hours ago I just posted something about Bermuda grass on the January thread--haha. And I hadn't even read this thread yet. Yes, the grass will return. BUT--it's weird, this spot has stayed clear for a long time--several months. Usually, once we move the coop, the grass comes back eventually. It will come back there too--it's bound to. I might get some cardboard on it while it's bare and put some cinder blocks (or whatever they're called) as a frame. Add some dirt and plant some pollinator plants there.

That sounds like a great idea. If the chickens have deposited large amounts of urine and poop there on the ground for a prolonged period of time, it can take the weeds and/or grass longer to return, but they do eventually return.

I was just researching BTE vegetable gardening... Have any of you had success with this method?

Someone posted a comment in one of my facebook groups once, asking how to get bermuda to grow. I replied back "plant a tomato, the bermuda will attack instantly."

Oh dear. . . . I don't even know how, exactly, to navigate Houzz! Love your OK gardening forums. Tried to find the right one for my question/dilemma. We're in Eastern OK, Wagoner County, close to Ft. Gibson Lake. I am thinking the rocks we live on are limestone--would any of you have an idea? Whatever they are, it's a very rare occasion when we can dig a shovel into the ground and not run into a rock. Sometimes 2-3 inches in diameter, sometimes 5-8 feet in diameter. (And I'm thinking it's limestone and therefore alkali soil because the heavenly blue hydrangeas I planted 2 years ago, while thriving and lovely, are turning pink.) We're also in the middle of a white oak forest, with partly shade in most parts of the 1.5 acre yard, which still has no problem maintaining 100 degree temps July-August. We built 3 4x20-feet cinder block raised beds (from Missouri, supposedly safe for this purpose), inside what used to be a hunting dog pen, so gravel on top of what the soil was, and no doubt "fertilized" by hunting dogs for 3-4 years, ending about 5 years ago, and another 3x30 foot one next to our shop (with a gravel bed). I got married and moved down here from Minnesota 2 years ago. That's when we got the cinder blocks and began our raised veggie garden beds. I couldn't justify buying tons of gardening soil. So last year, we began our beds with nothing but mulched oak leaves, about 15 inches deep. As it then began to sink, we added topsoil we bought from a neighbor nearby who sells such things. . . he cleared the soil from land next to his pond. Looked "good." Well, our oak leaf/little bit of dirt beds were not very successful, as you can imagine. . . and yet to our great surprise, last August, the droopy peppers and tomatoes began to grow, as did the zucchinis and butternut squash. And they were looking pretty darned healthy. We did get SOME tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes. Not great--but I thought it was great considering they had oak leaves to grow in! It has occurred to me that we are building this soil exactly backwards. Instead of starting the beds with dirt--ANY dirt--we started with mulched leaves. NOW we have added 3 4-6 inches of "dirt." And some compost (that I started, too, 2 yrs ago--I throw EVERY green thing I pull up into the compost--and all my kitchen scrap stuff, and leaves), and some rock dust just now, and alfalfa meal. My question to you all is, will all these ingredients eventually work out to make a good soil? I just have to laugh that we have a foundation of first, the dirt that was here, then the gravel bed "fertilized with dog poop, then 15 inches of oak leaves melted down, a bit of our neighbor's dirt, more leaves, a little more dirt and compost, just now another 6 inches of dirt and chicken poop, alfalfa meal and rock dust. What do you think? If we're going astray, can you advise how to make it better? (I just planted 100 onions, just for kicks, in one of the beds.) Oh and then there are the flower beds. Big ones. I lasagna gardened them--have done it 2 years--the newspaper/cardboard/mulched leaves/straw, oats growing crazy out of the straw we added last year, but I figured that'd be fine for a "green crop" ???? Is that going to work? I've been pulling up the green oats and just leaving them on the top. Any advice you can give will be mightily appreciated. And then I'll get into my questions about how in heaven's name to grow great stuff in 2-month-long stretches of 100-110 degree weather! :)

And yes, the Bermuda grass! Another new thing to me. I love it, I hate it. If it weren't for Bermuda grass and crab grass, we'd have hardly any grass at all. When I die, if I had to come back as a plant, I'd come back as Bermuda grass. One tough customer. I admire it even while hating it. My solution, since I hate to work, is to smother it with newspapers/cardboard and more mulch. Looks like that's how some of the rest of you handle it. :)

Personally, I think you're doing a great job building soil. Keep with the composting, the lasagna gardening and such. So, to answer your question "Will all these ingredients make good soil?" You betcha.

I must influence you to have soil testing done. You're bringing in soil, you're not certain what your existing soil is and the old used gravel beds have their own stuff. I'm not suggesting a soil test for contaminants but for pH and standard nutrients that a soil test includes. This will help you know what will actually thrive in your beds outside of the composted soil because with compost there's no need for concern. There's just so much going on with your soil, there's no definitive way to know what your soil pH is unless you want to wait a couple years after successive plant failures and a few wins. Plants will tell you what they need, but that is slow and a headache.

Ideally, you'll want to have separate tests for each bed, but if cost is an issue it's okay to combine a little soil from all of these and get a general idea, but it would still leave confusion. Best to test them individually.

As for contaminants such as the gravel beds or the old dog poo (or anything else), compost is your best friend. I think the dog poo and such is sufficiently old to not worry with, as long as you're adding fresh stuff. Keep adding those organic materials through compost, leaves and or dirt. and the soil microbes and bugs and small living things will clean it right up while giving your plants the nutrients they need to grow. I am not a purist concerning soil. I trust mother earth's cleaning processes. Others may have different opinions.

The way you describe your tomato and pepper plants makes me believe that once their roots systems were reaching down deep enough (below the oak leaves), they were able to find the nutrients they needed to thrive. This is fascinating to me and I think it is lovely how plants will really work around my own mistakes. If nutrients are in there, the roots will find them!

The hot weather just 'is' and it pretty much makes us impotent except for heat-loving plants that we don't mind constantly irrigating. For most, the garden is pretty much shut down during those two months and better spent on seedlings for a fall garden.

bon

Hi everyone! This is a wonderful thread.

Ugh. I was just wistfully hoping against hope that someone had found a way to kill bermuda that doesn't involve digging it out four feet deep and four feet wider than the garden bed, then sieving the dug out dirt, or using a chemical to kill it, or solarizing the soil for an entire summer. I'm not going to have much gardening time in the next years, and have a half started raised bed that is just sitting there growing bermuda. (Everything went to hades in the gardening time and allergy and arthritis departments a few years back. Still trying to balance things out. So I enjoy the OK garden board a great deal.)

Have a great gardening year this year!

Thanks so much for your comments. So glad I found this forum last year--your advice, knowledge, and experience has been, by far, the most helpful to me during my many long hours of reading up on my new gardening environment. In my Minnesota flower gardens (I had a busy full-time job then, so didn't even try to grow veggies), the soil wasn't so challenging. Lot of good black dirt up there, no rocks right under the surface to frustrate me. . . so you can imagine I am on a learning curve here, but am loving it. I think the biggest delight to me in my brief two-year journey has been the fall growing season. Amazing to see those peppers and tomatoes (and nasturtiums!) come roaring back to life and taking off. Just tickled me to pieces. I've never lived where there was a long and lovely autumn (or spring, for that matter), so am LOVING it. I had thought so long about getting the soil tested, and it was such a headache to read everything and to not know how to approach it that I had pretty much given up: studying, instead, the geology of the area. So thank you for the link, Dawn. Although I am fairly certain that our rocks are mostly limestone, I will go ahead with the soil testing from the link you provided.

I feel much better about the composition of the raised beds now with your comments, Bon and Dawn. I think I was mostly worried that we needed to get some DIRT in them--which we're now doing. I know the dirt is good enough, just from seeing where it came from, although I wasn't too worried about the quality, since we have so much organic stuff in there. Right now they are probably about half and half--dirt v organic. But of course the leaves have broken down and compressed mightily, and my compost pile isn't producing the quantity of compost I'd love to have, yet, so have doled it out sparingly among the raised beds and flower beds. And so now the beds have shrunk to 8-10 inches. Any ideas on the ideal depth? We're thinking about 16 inches would be better, so will continue to add more and more and more. Meanwhile, as I reminded my husband, those peppers and tomatoes took off like crazy last fall in those 8-10 inches.

Yes, Dawn--by far our biggest challenge for the compost is finding the greens. I prefer to leave grass cuttings on the lawn as much as possible. I think I'll grow a cover crop in the beds next fall--good idea? One thing I did since I so badly needed green stuff was to throw all the tomatoes, squash, flowers, weeds into piles as I pulled them out and ran over them with my mulching mower. Seems to work fine, except of course, those tough squash vines didn't crunch up--but got their leaves.

When we put in the raised beds in November of 2015, we also bought a big Worx 13-amp electric leaf mulcher--and as I piled our blown leaves onto a plastic tarp and hauled up to my husband, he'd mulch them. I hauled up 72 big tarpfuls to him. I love our oak trees--we have around 100 of them, mostly in the back half of our 2 acres. Leaf heaven.

And I groaned at your comments about the shade for some of the veggies. The raised beds in the dog pen get full sun until after 2 or so, when shade from the shop to the west begins shading the closest bed to it and then gradually moves across the other two beds. So they get from 8-10 hours of full sun. Last summer I talked about getting some shade for them (and will indeed get shade cloth--thanks for the comment) Also, since the dog pen is 6 feet high--and in the middle bed, we left the existing fence, which divided the pen in half--I'm thinking I could plant cucumbers there and let them climb up that fence, creating additional shade for the plants to the east of them. For that matter could plant vining plants on any of the outside fences, too. Something for me to think about.

Okay--with your words of encouragement, we'll plow on. Thanks much! Now will check through the other subjects to see what else I can learn.

BTE gardening--Octavia Hunter. From what I know about it, I am getting the idea that's the way most folks here are gardening. . . all natural being the goal. have an enormous flower bed on the south side of our house, which is 3-tiers, built by some of the hundreds of large rocks that were in this yard. I'm not sure what kind of dirt is underneath the rocks on top of black plastic that's in all 3 tiers (my sideline project for this summer--get the rocks and plastic out--can't see where that's doing any good for nature at all!), so that'll be more newspaper/cardboard, mulched leaves and more green stuff. And then more veggies and flowers! Yay!

Nancy Russell Waggoner,

I am far from being as knowledgeable as the other folks on this forum so I can only offer this as something I have picked up along the way.

Do you drink coffee & tea?

If you save your tea & coffee grounds and stir them in your garden soil and compost it will help with soil tilth and soil structure and it helps speed up compost. This all comes from a study by Oregon State University. It will also help Hydrangeas turn blue. They are full of nitrogen, magnesium & potassium. Slugs & snails don't like coffee grounds and catsdon't like them and are less likely to play in a garden where they are used. I don't know about squirrels. Worms love to eat coffee grounds. Also tea & coffee grounds help prevent fungus such as Fusarium, Pythium & Sclerotinia. They are also good for tomatoes, eggplant & peppers. Coffee & tea grounds are not acid but actually close to PH neutral so will not cause garden soil to become acid.

They don't do any thing to kill Bermuda grass. I hope this might help.

Thanks--I do save my coffee grounds-- and right now trying to think of places in town that'll save them for me.

merrybookwyrm, We'll all be dead and long gone and the bermuda grass will just keep on growing, destroying every flower bed and garden spot we ever built and wiping out any trace we ever were here. The one good thing about bermuda grass is that at least it isn't Johnson grass! Johnson grass is bermuda grass on high doses of steroids.

nancy, I wouldn't worry too much about the depth of the beds. Just keep improving the soil and you'll know when the beds are deep enough. Much depends on how well the soil beneath the beds drains. If it drains well, 10" might be enough. If it is very slow-draining clay, the garden might do better with beds that are 16" deep. Just watch the plants and you'll know when they are happy.

Cover crops are a great idea and there's many to choose from. Just be sure the one you choose is cold-hardy in your zone.

I grow everything on our 8' high fences for extra shade. In our climate, and especially in drought years, it seems impossible to have too much shade. The plants are just begging for relief in the summer months.

My least favorite thing about shade cloth is that the snakes use it like hammocks and lie on top of it. I think they are sitting there hoping to catch bugs that fly into the garden, but seeing a snake just makes my skin crawl.

Many of us try to garden as naturally as possible. Not just naturally, but sustainably. I like reusing leaves, garden debris, grass clippings, etc. as mulch or to make compost---it is so much better than bagging up stuff and sending it off with the household garbage. Cardboard is the best compost ingredient and also can be used as a weed barrier in pathways or garden beds---it attracts earthworms by crazy. They eat it and digest it and turn it into worm castings, and that means the cardboard stays here and feeds the earth instead of going off to a landfill. I'm all about keeping stuff here that is useful instead of filling up more space in a landfill.

Once you start composting, it is amazing how many things can go into a compost pile!

Dawn

I was reading your comments last year, Dawn, on the snakes. My sympathies. We have some. Pesky little pygmy rattlers two years in a row in my big central flower bed. And we have lots of small earth snakes. . . found one in my art room (formerly half of a double-car garage), even. Took the little rascal out to the yard with a paper towel and told it to stay there. I've been told there are copperheads around, but haven't seen any yet. Nevertheless, always wear my gardening gloves now and sturdy shoes and socks. I try to remember to always be watchful. Thanks for your depth-of-bed comment.

And, we love our cardboard (and newspapers). When I run out, I go to Walmart on the day they get their shipments and get more. I've already spread our garden to another 20x20 foot plot outside the fence; smothered the weeds with plastic tarp last summer/fall and will put zucchinis and something else there. I'm thinking the deer won't be keen on zucchini. However, since we got our big german shepherd/husky mix Titan 18 months ago, the deer have been much better about staying off our property. Titan seems to know our property boundaries and leaves the deer alone unless they encroach too far into the backyard--then he lopes after them until they move on. Wow--it's like magic. Except, of course, he's not outside at night. Still. . .

Nancy,

Be careful using old veggie plants as organic matter. If they are diseased, this it not good idea. I know that chopping and dropping makes sense because that's what happens in the natural world, right? I could be wrong, but Dawn always advises us to throw our tomatoes and diseased plants away quickly after they are spent to prevent the spread of disease. If you consider the reality that we are planting non-native species as vegetable plants it justifies the conclusion that chop and drop of diseased plants is harmful to the soil.

For this reason, your idea of a cover crop is most excellent!

Our deer eat zucchini, summer squash, winter squash and pumpkin plants down to the ground...big prickly leaves, fruit, vines, flowers and all...when they are hungry enough. Maybe your deer won't, but if you're in a part of OK that is in some degree of drought when growing season rolls around and the deer are very hungry, you should know that there is very little they won't eat. Before we put up the 8' tall fence, they'd jump the shorter fence and literally eat every single plant down to the ground overnight. Every single one. It was shocking. Nowadays, they only get to eat anything that sticks out thru the fence, which is precious little. I learned my lessons from the deer long ago.

Because of past and ongoing issues with bobcats and coyotes, and a couple of horrible years with an occasional cougar passing through, none of our animals are outside after dark. I suspect our dogs would keep the deer away, but leaving them out is too risky. Two of our dogs survived a battle with coyotes and I don't want for any of us to ever go through that again----and it was in the middle of the day in winter, not even at night or anywhere close to either morning or evening. The coyotes are really bad around here this year, so folks are having more than the usual amount of trouble with deer gathering in their yards and eating shrubs and stuff right now. We expect it is because the deer are fleeing the river bottom lands along the Red River and coming up into our rural neighborhood on higher ground to get away from the coyotes. Considering we have coyotes coming through our property every night and sometimes even in the middle of the day, I don't know how the deer think they are getting away from the coyotes, but maybe it is just the deer feel safer closer to homes. A friend told me yesterday that her neighbors were out shooting guns at 2 a.m. right in their front yard, and we concluded they likely were trying to run off the coyotes that probably were in their yard.

Snakes here are so plentiful and always will be. We're just too close to the river and to a lot of Wildlife Management Area land. I just have had to learn to be really, really careful when I'm outdoors. Sadly the venomous snakes seem to outnumber the nonvenomous ones a great deal, because I've been able to learn to tolerate the presence of some of the smaller, non-venomous ones, as long as they aren't rat snakes and chicken snakes that are eating our eggs and chickens.

You can put diseased plants on a hot compost pile (one that gets steaming hot in the middle) if you choose, but not on a cold pile that doesn't attain the right level of heat. Sometimes I do just bag up diseased plants and trash them because my summer compost piles have a hard time achieving any heat since the wildlife and the free-ranging poultry dig through them multiple times daily and scatter stuff everywhere. I rake the piles back up, but they generally keep the piles from staying piled up long enough to build up any heat....and they eat anything that would decompose enough to create heat. We ought to fence off the compost piles to keep the wild things out of them, but then I'd feel guilty in drought years when the wild things really are starving and need any morsel of food they can find. It is a delicate balance sometimes, striving to compost and to maintain a nice, productive garden while also trying to peacefully co-exist with the wildlife as much as one possibly can.

After two very wet years in our county in 2015 and 2016, we have had more plant diseases than usual, so I've been pretty careful to make sure the compost piles have gotten hot this past year---I've added more chicken manure to them than usual, but the chickens even dig and scratch their way through all their own manure nonstop all day long once I put it on the compost piles.

I still drop a lot of diseased plants into the pathways of the garden, which are heavily mulched, and don't worry excessively about them because I add new layers of grass clippings to the paths weekly, so the diseased plants get buried quickly---often the same day I remove them from the beds. I don't leave the clippings on the lawn to feed the soil. I want to keep the lawn soil as poor and pitiful as possible because I don't want for the bermuda grass to grow any more vigorously than it already does!

We didn't plant the bermuda. We didn't see any bermuda grass when we walked this property numerous times before we bought it and built our house. What happened is that everything was head-high native pastures and woodlands when we bought it. When we mowed down the pasture in the area where the house was going to be built, it was the end of summer in a very bad drought year here and no grass regrew. Then, in the spring, bermuda grass sprang up everywhere around the house. One of our old farmer neighbors stopped by and saw the green sprigs of bermuda grass and was gleeful. He excitedly told us that we were lucky because we wouldn't have to plant a lawn. My reaction was a very dry "Yippee. Lucky us." Ha! I was already trying to figure out how to get rid of it, though I expect it always will be with us. I merely consider the bermuda lawn grass to be a source of grass clippings to use in the garden as mulch---I wouldn't be sorry if it died---and I do nothing to encourage it, but I also know it is never going to go away.

Dawn