April 13, 2018 – Recent wiregrass skirmish

         Wiregrass in the South is this gardener’s bane, nightmare, hardship, scourge, plague – I just can’t find the right words to cover all the emotions I have against wiregrass.

Stupid me, years ago [18 years in fact], when we couldn’t get a lawn to grow in the drought, I took the advice of a garden center owner and bought an expensive bag of Bermuda grass seed. She indicated a little bit goes a long way.  I splashed it around the front lawn, where we were having the most trouble and some in those other areas where the lawn was thin. 

Yes, we did get a cover of green, 

yet the consequences were unseen.

         Bermuda grass does make a nice lawn. It is drought resistant and the grass runs above ground and underground and it also self-seeds. However, like anything else growing when something is out of place, such as the grass growing into my front cobblestone walkway or my flower beds, it is a weed. 

I’ve sprayed it with everything available short of nuclear waste and wiregrass waltzes right through it.  I’ve used the lawn edger to cut it back from the sidewalk and the wiregrass turns down into the ground, goes deeper, runs underground, then pops up about one or two feet in the middle of a perennial flower bed, or under the cobblestone side walk in a thriving manner. What? We have weed barrier in place.  It doesn’t matter; it’s growing tips are like steel blades.  It will grow through anything: plastic, weed barrier, even concrete. I expect it is under my house and someday will grow through the floorboards.

         Years ago, when I created my raised vegetable garden near the kitchen at the back of the house out in the lawn, I sprayed off the grass. I set down weed barrier around the raised bed and then topped it with mulch for many years.  However, the mulch decided it wanted to grow luxurious weeds and I was tired of pulling weeds out of the mulch path and decided to replace with brick pavers in order to save my weeding time with actual vegetable gardens or flowers, not paths and sidewalks. 

Last year, I pulled up the mulch, pulled up the weed barrier and again carved out the weeds under it down bare red clay.  Then I put down 15-year landscape fabric and proceeded with my paved patio project.  I left pathways to the lawn to be completed this year. 

This year I will complete the two paths I’ve named Path A and Path B.  Path A, I hacked out the weeds even though I’d used pre-emergence on that section. I put down landscape fabric and placed in the pavers. I did that last week, with not much fanfare except I had a little muscle ache the next day from being out of practice.

B path is a different story.  I had to pull up the old mulch and weed barrier from that area I’d put down years ago to get to the bare ground to begin the project. SURPRISE.  I had a nightmare freeway of wiregrass embedded in the red clay. I tried scraping it out with my trusty DeWitt Hand hoe and got nowhere fast.

The soil was damp and the wiregrass was stuck solid.  Then I took the garden hose and hard-spray blasted the soil around the freeway network of wiregrass and another  SURPRISE.  I found it more serious than at first blush. I’d only seen the top half-inch of the tenacious wiregrass. A mat of blonde runners covered the soil in a 3-foot by 2-foot swath.  I sat sack on my heels and decided to re-group.

The next couple of days it rained, and I let nature expose even more of the white fibrous roots.  Then the sun baked the white fibrous roots and I thought that would improve the situation expecting to chip them out from the dry red clay.

I did chip it out – the hard way – half a day with a pickaxe. All during the chipping project, I am trying to find the right words to describe the situation to fellow gardeners who have tackled wiregrass in their gardens. 

“Wiregrass is like pulling barbwire from concrete.”