I hope you never come across this plant. I’ve been helping my grandma out with her garden. In her berry patch was lots of grass. Grass that you couldn’t pull up and it chocked out all the berries. At first I thought it was the lawn grass spreading over its bounds. That would have been a lot nicer. Instead it was a mean stand of quackgrass.

Quackgrass grows in irrigated soil. It has tons and tons of undergroudn rhizomes. If you come across this grass, the worst control measure is to till. Tilling cuts up all the rhizomes into smaller pieces and does a wonderful job of propagating the plant. That’s opposite of killing the plant.

So after I figured out it was quackgrass, I started to think of control measures. Here is what I ended up doing:

I fertilized the plant and made it really happy. Sounds strange. The philosophy behind that is that quackgrass’s rhizomes have a lot of dormant buds. They will just come back even if you spray or pull it up. By making it happy, I hopefully made those dormant buds send up shoots. I waited about a month, then I sprayed it with glyphosate. I did it again in two weeks. That actually did a fairly good job of killing off the plant, but I really don’t want it to make a comeback.

The next step was hand-digging out all the rhizomes. This took a long time. I’m not done with the large patch I’m working on yet. But…to see soil that you could work with and rake through after I was done was worth it.  We could plant in it now…but I think we will wait. The next few months I will be watching the bed, looking for quackgrass to make a comeback. And I plan to nip out all the attempts.

This is the soil full of rhizomes. The grass isn't deserving enough of a picture.

We dug out two huge garbage bags full of rhizomes for a 8'x15' area. Wow.

The moral of this story is–learn to recognize your weeds. This weed wouldn’t have been such a problem if it was controlled when it started to invade, not years after. Also, by knowing what it was, I was able to choose good control measures and avoid ones (like tilling) that are ineffective. If you live in the west, Weeds of the West is an invaluable book. It has the id info for nearly all the weeds you come across.