"Sue" wrote:

I want to dig up some more of my couch lawn to extend a garden bed.
Previously I have been digging it out and trying to save as much of the top
soil as possible. I should add the lawn is only four months old, grown from
seed and the roots don't go down for miles, YET!! :-)
I guess I am starting to get lazy but was thinking that maybe I could spray
the area with Zero or similar. Will I be doing the wrong thing in trying
to avoid digging. I would like to be able to replant the area within a
month.

I normally slice the top layer of turf off with a spade, then dig out all the
root clumps with a fork. We have sandy soil, so this is fairly easy. If I
can't use them elsewhere, I pile the turfs in a heap, and then break them up at
leisure. Zero would probably work equally well, though in my experience you
have to spray at least twice, with an interval of at least a week between them,
to get a reasonable kill. However you will still have to dig the ground, at
least where you want to plant things. Either way you are likely to get some
regeneration over a period of several months, so you should try to plan your
plantings to allow for you to dig this out.


Roger Riordan AM