We spent over 4 years building up our soil, only to have Johnson grass start taking it over. This last year, we had a lot of Johnson grass, so we decided to do raised beds and smother out the Johnson grass.
If any of you know wabout Johnson grass, you know that it is pervasive and nearly impossible to get rid of.
You can’t burn it out (it seems to like that and causes it to propagate), dig it out (it spreads by seed and by roots – so, if you dig it and break off the tiniest piece, it spreads), pull it out, and as far as we know there isn’t a weed killer that will destroy it – and we REFUSE to use any weed killer.
So our only recourse was to build raised beds on top of it, using weed barrier underneath to smother it.
Starting in February, I built bed frames from 2×6 wood and made the frames 4ft wide x 12ft long. I also put in a 48ft long x 1ft wide x 1ft tall bed for the potatoes,and two more 1ft wide x 1ft tall beds – one 24 ft long and one 10ft long.
By the end of April, I had 15 beds finished and Marilyn had them all pretty much planted. Below are the beds before planting/mulching and what it looks like now, at the end of April. I still have 15 beds to put in over the next 2 weeks, so you can imagine how much we can grow!
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- Here’s how it looked when we fist started in February.
Tags: raised beds, square foot gardening