[permaculture-oceania] Cooch grass control

[jedd]

On Friday 09 June 2006 00:05, Harry Wykman wrote:
 ] Does anyone know of very effective ways of eliminating cootch grass?  I 
 ] am trying to prepare a community garden site in Western Australia.

 Hi Harry,

 I'm having growing (ha ha!) problems with this stuff, too.

 Some things that I've tried, with varying degrees of success:
 -  heavy mulching (straw), but it does tend to grow up and around,
 -  sheet mulching (newspaper, then straw), and this tends to suppress
     it slightly better, but some manual intervention is still required
     as it comes through -- this remains the most effective approach
     that I've tried,
 -  underlay, which doesn't work anywhere near as well as I'd hoped
     and expected - the grass manages to force holes through it, which
     is pretty impressive.  Given some garlics I just planted can't
     work their way through 2 sheets of wet newspaper...  Anyhoo,
     next I'll be trying underlay with lots of straw mulch on top.

 Pulling it out is laborious and ultimately pointless in my experience
 (though it does provide an ephemeral sensation of satisfaction).

 Things I have heard about, but not yet tried:
 -  tomato plants apparently suppress couch, though I'm not sure
    via what mechanism (allelotrophy, shading, competition, etc)
 -  similarly, other plants make good borders to stop the stuff,
    which assumes you're happy to have it on one side of said
    border, and continue to do border patrolling (comfrey is the
    oft' cited example, but I'd imagine most densely clumping slow-
    spreading plants would work - Dianella spp, kangaroo paw, etc).
 -  find something that eats the stuff -- chooks are excellent, but
    need controlling, and might introduce other problems in your
    environment.  Guinea pigs are possibly an even better bet, but
    incur similar management overhead.
 -  like most things, you can probably kill it by solarisation, but
     this would probably be a summer thing.

 Speculating -- hitting it with fresh chicken manure, then sheet
 mulching with 10+ sheets of newspaper, big overlaps, then a heck
 of a lot of straw on top .. might offer the best (non-animal, minimal
 effort, longest-lasting, ground left most usable) approach.

 Jedd.