Another attempt in dealing with the couch grass

The raised beds

Our garden 2 with the raised beds has been very overwhelming with the couch grass growing threw every where. We had already removed some beds that where already completely overgrown with couch grass as you can see in this post. Constantly pulling out the couch grass in this many raised beds is simply to time consuming. Another problem was that our lawn mower tractor did not fit in between the raised beds to keep the grass on the walking paths low. Therefore we decided to change the purpose and our approach in garden 2 completely.

Our garden 2 will be for the fruit trees, which are already there, flowers, strawberries and herbs. Only the vegetable patch will be for growing annual plants, mainly vegetables.. The plan is to have the raised beds, the ones with the fruit trees in them, so full with plants that there will be no room for the couch grass. The raised beds without fruit trees will be removed, so the pathway maintenance will be much easier.

This means a lot of plants, mainly strawberries, need to find a new home. The currant bushes found a new spot in between the blueberry bushes in the berry garden. The herbs are combined with strawberries and found places in the raised beds which are staying. We have not finished this work yet, but we are getting there.

The vegetable patch in our garden 2

The vegetable patch is very much taken over by the couch grass, but still gave us a nice harvest of onions, red beets, chard, parsnip and even some tomatoes from a volunteer tomato plant.

We did not rotary till the vegetable patch last year and the couch grass took over most of the patch. We will have to do something about that. With the treeless raised beds being removed we will also extend the vegetable patch. Since also the kid’s raised beds will be filled with perennials, they will have the vegetable patch for there annual plant wishes the coming growing season.