Gill Matthews writes

wrote in message
oups.com...
Does anyone have any good ideas about how to get rid of weeds and grass
from a rather large sloped area in my garden? Ultimately, I want to
plant a wide flower meadow onto it but I gather I need to get rid of
the grass that's there first.

What do people think?

Depends how much time and effort you have got to spare. You could dig up the
ground and carefully pull out each root of everything in which case project
meadow could go ahead next spring, or you could hire a brush cutter to cut
the undergrowth to a uniform 1 cm and then go down the supermarket and get
huge piles of cardboard packaging and make an airtight layer over the whole
area using bricks etc to hold it down, in which case you would be looking at
2 years before starting operation meadow. Mostly though IME avoid rotavating
as weeds like twitch and dandelions make excellent root cuttings :-(

The problem with anything where you leave weeds to die down in situ is
that in rotting they will help raise the fertility of the soil, which is
one of the main problems in starting a meadow - in fertile conditions,
grass and things like dandelion out-perform the sort of flowers which
most people want to see - a problem if you want to establish a
permanent wildflower sward. I don't know what the situation is with an
annual meadow of cornfield weed type flowers.
--
Kay