HELP!!! How do I get rid of nut grass/nut sedge???

First if this is in the wrong place please direct me to the correct place to put it. I couldn't find a "weeds that need to go to hell" category so plants was the next best thing.

Iam 19, live in Mississippi, and love to garden. My main weeds are nutgrass/nutsedge and Bermuda grass. Bermuda grass is a walk in the park compared to nutgrass. It defies all my attempts to overcome it both permaculture and tillage. I've mulched and laid down cardboard. It either waits for the cardboard to soften up before it pokes through, (it has a white point when coming up that is sharp enough to draw blood, I speak from experience) or finds where the cardboard overlaps, runs horizontally until it comes up through the mulch. And no reasonable amount of mulch will stop it either. It can outgrow almost everything. It spreads through roots and seeds. You have to get every hair thin root,nut and plant well over a foot deep to eradicate it. This is almost impossible. I spent all summer digging up every single root and nut once a week on a 4 by 5 bed and it's still coming up!!!So in desperation in turned to the internet and read about spreading  sugar on the ground. Has anyone tried this? I have also kinda shamefully considered using special herbicides (normal stuff will just kill the leaves, it will come right back) and then rehabilitate the soil. Because if I ever conquer this plant I will be living on easy street. I know most of the wonderful people here are older and much wiser than I am, so please give me your input on how to conquer this beast. Thanks

Allow me to commisserate with you....

Here is my ongoing battle with chufa, nutsedge. Hmmm... looks like I need to update the thread.

Shorter cliff note version:

I tried wood chips to smother them. They got stronger. But easier to pull as the woodchips broke down.

I have and continue to excavate various small areas, pretending to be an archeologist. I have a wooden form with 1/4 inch hardware cloth stapled to it, I get a shovel full of dirt, and use the form as a sifter, pulling out the chufa to be destroyed.

Cover the area with a tarp to solarize the area for several months. I did mine from April to late September.

Follow up with grasses, tall cover-crop to choke out any leftover nutgrass/sedges. My fight is ongoing...

I think in your case, sifting the soil might be successful after the solarization is done.

ITs crazy people talk about this as a food source. I have eaten it, it takes an hour to get a half cup of almost inedible little bulbs, and it will completely take over a void. Its like mint.

We had a bunch. I was able to pretty much eradicate it by moving the garden, letting tall grass come in, graze it, and now very little if any is present. This leads me to think pigs would be a one-season near fix, then just put out brushfires...

Silvanus,

I will give you my suggestion for getting rid of nutsedge, which is one of the most stubborn weeds out there BTW.  My approach would be the drastic smother technique.  By this I mean that I would clear as close to ground as possible, lay down cardboard, multiple layers of newspaper, or some decomposable material, then pile woodchips nice and thick on top.  

The cardboard (or whatever) will stop the nutsedge in its tracks, and the cardboard plus the chips will deny light.  If you want to plant, you probably could be using fertile holes, or cut little holes right where you want the plants and otherwise smother out EVERY weed.  A small number of seeds might take root in the woodchips themselves, but they pull out easily, root and all.

Aside from drastic smothering, I don’t know what else to do to eliminate nutsedge.

Eric

How would a nutsedge lawn look?  That may be my best bet!

The natural ways of controlling nut sedge that I know of is smothering! This could come from a covercrop that outcompetes or by utilizing layers such as cardboard. There is a reason nut sedge is so universally frusterating...

Hi, Debbie

Welcome to the forum.

I feel that a nut sedge lawn would not be very pretty due to the seed head.

The problem with that kind of lawn is that the nut sedge might quickly invade your neighbors' lawn which might not be a happy situation.

As others have suggested using cardboard with a 6" to 12" mulch of wood chips would be very beneficial.

Nutsedge. Will grow 3 inches if mown to 24 inches tall with the seedheads taller. Pic from here.

We've had nutsedge in our perenial bed for years.  I've been pulling it... it's a nuisance, but not the worst weed I've dealt with.  Today I decided to eat some of the pea-sized tubers while working in the garden.  They were OK.  Nothing really to talk about, but I like to know what I can eat.

I dealt with nutsedge and bermuda for the ten years I lived in south Georgia.  I found that the only viable short-term answer was cardboard and top-mulch.  This would usually give vigorous transplants enough of a start that they would succeed anyway even as the weeds came back.  I would have to re-do the mulch every single year.  All the other ideas...tillage once a week, solarizing all summer under plastic, penning pigs or chickens on it for months....all of these might set it back but not get rid of it permanently, and at least with the cardboard I can be growing some crop in the space anyway.  Neither weed tolerates frost, so if you can, grow stuff from fall through spring as much as you can.  I did gradually notice that both of these weeds do not tolerate shade for very long....they don't grow in the woods, or in dense thickets of bush, and even a heavy tall dense covercrop of something like sudangrass seems to set them back a bit.  I think a long term answer to them is to learn to treat an annual garden as an event in time, in succession, rather than as a permanent institution.   The idea of a kind of shifting cultivation began to grow on me....wherein I would clear an area of bush and grow annuals in that spot until these nasty perennial weeds showed up, which would be the signal to let that spot grow back up to bush and go clear another.  This is an ancient and sustainable practice in much of the warmer parts of the world, actually, although from what I read about it, it is usually soil nutrient depletion that drives the cycle more than weeds.  Alas, I've moved to colder climates where winter makes these weeds less vigorous, so I never got the chance to test this theory.