Thx. I'm in Phoenix so the Bermuda is most active in the winter but I killed it off myself months ago with fluzop. I already told the landscaper to skip the felt. And I would never use a pre-emergent. It prevents all seeds from sprouting, including flower seeds. Kills your earth worms too.

Don't do it! When I was trained at the Desert Landscaper School at the Botanical Gardens they told us to always talk clients out of this. The felt and plastic traps moisture and changes the soils in a bad way.

Along with that, the felt with come up after a few years and it will stick up through your granite rock and look terrible! Plastic does the same.

I decided not to use the felt. They start demo today. yippee!

Just get yourself a good scuffle hoe (I went with Rogue Hoe) and a steel tine rake and you'll be able to handle whatever the weeds can throw at you. No ugly tarp coming up through the gravel mulch and no chemicals turning your soil into a wasteland for the things you want to grow.

The trick for weed control is to make sure they don't go to seed. I had a neighbor who always went to the mailbox with her weeder in hand and removed any weeds that caught her attention.

A "hula hoe" - the loop-shaped one - can slice out weeds and leave the gravel undisturbed. Let the weeds wilt and then rake them up with a flexible tined leaf rake and toss them on the compost.

A flame weeder is made for gravel.

Spraying with glyphosate works well for those years when the rains are abundant and the weeds are erupting. That's also the year when a pre-emergent like Surflan fails because the rains wash it out of the right layer.