Dealing with Couch Grass

It goes by various names... Couch Grass. Quick Grass. Quack Grass. Scutch Crass. Twitch Grass. Witch Grass. I just have my own name for it... BLOODY ANNOYING. S'cuse my French.

It has long creeping rhizomes roots which means it gets literally everywhere and is really hard to get rid of. To coin a phrase, I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

I put down a load of newspapers earlier in the year and they did a reasonable job in keeping it somewhat under control. Except at the edges. The roots travel a few inches under the ground until they hit something hard, in this case the wooden beds, and then start creeping along that bed sending up tufts of grasses.

Today I spent a good few hours digging in the woodchips to find those roots and pull them out.

The woodchips are a bit compacted, but very easy to dig though, so once they're loosened up a bit it's relatively easy to pull out the rhizomes. It's just back-breaking work. And it's never ending either. So I am determined to dig over as much of the plot as possible to try and disrupt the damn plant, before once again mulching with woodchips and newspapers.

It's not going to be easy. But then we didn't get allotments thinking it was.