I think if it were me, i'd wait until fall for cooler weather and less stress on the plants. Digging most of it shouldn't be a problem, but i'd work around your peony as they don't like to be disturbed and will sulk for a few years if you attempt to lift it. The yucca and iris can dry a bit while you work- look at the recent thread for instructions on iris. The rest you'll want to trim back some of the tops (esp blooms if they have them) to compensate for the roots that you'll lose.

If you can wait til after a nice rain, you'll have an easier job and the plants will be less stressed. If you can't, water the area well, and then start your digging an hour or 2 later. You want to retain the soil around the rootballs if you can and it isn't too infested with bermuda. If it is infested, i'd dig them, hose off the soil and replant in pots with clean soil. Keep the plants in the shade in some tubs or buckets or planters while you work- you want them as cool and shaded as you can manage, esp if it'll take a few days to do the weeding, etc.

I'm sure others can give you more advice, but bermuda is hard to get rid of. I tend not to use chemicals, so you'll have to look to others to find out what works to kill it if you want to go that route. If you use round up, you will have to wait a week or so to replant and be very careful not to get it near the peony. If you choose to do it by hand, you may need to dig and then sort of sift the soil to make sure you got most or all of the roots before you replant. You could also solarize the soil (cook it under plastic), but that will be hard to do with the peony in place and it takes a few weeks. Don't till it until you're sure the bermuda roots are gone or dead if you plan to till. Just do the best you can around the peony and know you can revisit it in winter when it's dormant to get any stragglers.

Mulching the bed should help keep the weeds down while the plants reestablish themselves. Don't plant the iris deep at all- leave the corms on the surface or they won't bloom. You can trim the foliage down to 1/2 or 1/4 and weigh the corm with a rock til it roots. Keep everything watered but not soggy for a few weeks til the get their new roots dug in. Good luck!

I'd dig out the iris and canna and store with some potting soil thrown over roots in shady place. Then I'd put down newspaper over soil except around peony. Then mulch. Then newspaper, then mulch. Water occasionally if we keep having no rain. Wait a few weeks. Open up some spots and put iris and canna back. Mulch around them well. Put the iris pretty close together, so you can minimize later weeding. Keep mulched. Somehow the newspaper and mulch layers work. You can use grass clippings for the mulch layers.

So, Brenda, the mulch/newspaper works on bermuda? Basically, that's lasagna gardening. Does it work long term? I'd love that if that's the case! I have a couple areas i need to deal with some bermuda that's not planted with 'real' plants at all and it'd be much easier than most any other method. I always learn so much on here.

hi everyone,
I must say that I tried cardboard beneath the mulch to try to squelch bermudagrass and it came up through it. Its growing tips are amazing. I've had to do what edmundac is doing....remove all perennials (being sure to get all the bermuda roots out of each rootball, kill the bermuda and start over. Once it was out of the beds, it wasn't nearly as hard to control the bed edges.

I am fighting the Devil Grass too, I HATE this stuff, it seems no matter WHAT you do it keeps coming back! I have pulled, weeded, covered with cardboard, everything I can think of.
Brenda, have you actually done these steps you mention above and know first hand that it will work because I have some cardboard down in a few beds now that is about and inch thick, they are some of those large shipping crate type boxes, they are very heavy and the devil grass STILL came up through them!
I tell you this stuff is a nightmare and almost makes me want to stop gardening all together. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that this is the 3rd place I have tried to control it.
(HEY TAMMY!!! long time no talk hehe) I have a spot now that I have a large piece of plastic down, it has been down for at least a month now. I haven't checked under it yet, because to be honest I don't think this will work either!
The lady that lived here before me had these rubber mat things down as a walkway to her free form deck, the grass looked pretty dead until we actually moved the forms with in days it had greened back up and these mats had been down for at least 8 months!
pfmastin HOW did you actually kill it? I have came to the conclusion it can not be killed! It is devil grass and will preveil!
edmundac sorry, there, I don't think I was much help huh? I would do as suggested on the plants though. I did move a peony about a month ago and put it in pots (I divided it) and it isn't happy. It is all droopy and such, it may or may not come back out. SO, if you want to keep it and see it bloom, I would absolutely work around that one. The others well, they can pretty mcuh survive anything if you treat them well enough. I have moved irises alround in any given month of the summer. They don't seem to mind it much. Although you will lose the green growth on them. They will put back out though without a hitch.
I think the yuccas are weeds myself LOL. The Susan's will pout really bad, but if you can give them plenty of water they should recover, otherwise do as suggested and pot them up and keep them in the shade until this fall then you can plant them where you intended to move them too.
Good Luck with killing the devil grass, if you manage to do it, please give tips on what you did LOL.

:) Fran

pfmastin HOW did you actually kill it?

As much as I hate to say it, Roundup...no holds barred.

pfmastin
Ok, I understand that. NOW even though I truly hate the thought of using these products, I am also tired of fighting this grass and it taking over everything.
Could you email me and let me know exactly WHICH product you purchased, because I have looked at some. I even used Ortho on it, which was a big waste of money, that product is crap.
ANYWAY, I looked at them recently and with the cost of them I want to make sure I get the right one. ONE that WILL KILL this devil grass :).
I was going to email you but you don't have a link posted for that.

edmundac, when you decide what you are going to do with this bed and it is finished POST PICS, we LOVE pics around here LOL.

:) Fran

I have been dealing with killing Bermuda for nine years and round up only works temporarily. Even Bermuda sprayed multiple times with round up will still come back.
I would remove all the perennials in September then start killing the grass. Spray it at least 4 times with round up over several weeks. Wait several more weeks then plant and mulch.
Expect it to show up again, although in smaller areas, next year.

Poor edmundac..you know how I handled bermuda grass?
I moved.

My new sodded lawn at my new house came infested with nutsedge.
Every year I treat to kill it and it pops up somewhere else.
But, it's better than bermuda..for sure.

Bermuda is segmented, putting out roots along its length. That's why you don't want to try and till bermuda to make a garden..you wind up with millions of rootable segments.I learned that the hard way and in subsequent attempts found that even sifting the soil didn't get all the bermuda out.
Wasted effort anyway since the soil was filled with multi-years worth of bermuda seed that tilling brought to the surface to sprout.
Bermuda, I am convinced is an underground creature like mushrooms. If you ever have a reason to excavate along a wall or foundation, you'll see how bermuda roots grow deeply like thick cord with roots every 8-12" that send up a sharp spike of growth to the surface to 'bloom and make seed'.
The growth you spray above ground kills perhaps a couple of segments underground but not the whole 'monster', not by any means.
I had the money,the time and the energy and I threw a lot of all at this insidious weed grass succeeding only to clear small areas if I dug down 2' plus and sifted all the soil. First year seedlings of bermuda could be killed with glyphosate if you caught it in hot July but if you let it go til the next year, forget it. The main plant has sent off shoots in other directions, all segmented.

So really..when hubby gave me the opportunity to move, I took it.