g'day maureen,

had to do a google to figure what your hunglethingy was yeh just like sheet mulching/raised bed gardening/compost pile in simple terms, all recycle organic material. anyhow also did a google on your liriope stuff reckon if you pour the urine on fresh the plant would probably love it, they say if you let the urine go old more than 24 hours it goes amonic and is then a weed killer?? dunno? if you were going to use that maybe just buy some amonia and apply that? use the good fresh urine on your food trees or vege' gardens.

reckon you migh take a step back and say that from the word go when you where starting your hunglethingy that is when you should have laid the kill barrier before laying any of the other material.

me personally i don't know of any plant that won't cease to grow when starved of light, so a very thick layer of newspaper over the liriope after cutting it to the ground might well have saved you the hassles you now have. also as when i needed to get rid of comfry at one time i simply daily pulled any new shoots as soon they appeared the comfry died.

so not sure if you can use the newspaper now or maybe start all over again? but the paper needs to be used properly to get the desired result and for persistant plants (won't say weeds because in permaculture i reckon there is no such thing maybe a plant in the wrong place but anything that grows green can be converted into food to feed the soil).

now back to using mulch to kill stuff like grasses etc.,. when i use mulch i lay it around 20+"s deep, i use spoilt fodder hay or my preffered pastur grasses as mulch, i find very little comes up through that, the layer has to be a heavy/dense layer no mamby pamby fluffed up layer, like i say works for me.

len

mail len

lens garden page

Killin' lirope ain't easy. Try to shade it out with a solid cover like cardboard. That may be the only way to kill the stuff in an organic method.
mike

yep that's what i have found pretty much nothing will grow if you cut off its sunlight source. i have gotten rid of nut grass using newspaper and that is a pretty hard thing to get rid of as it grows from seed and from nuts on rhizomes under the soil.

reckon around 40 pages thick of newspaper overlapped properly and then mulched on top of has got to come real close to doing the job. but in the end if you have to use glyphosate then you gotta use it hey? it could come down to how you use it maybe?

len

I have covered my liriope with cardboard for over one year and I can still find some live roots. It is tough!

g'day kim,

that is the same for nut grass the nuts stay viable in the soil for a very long time, so when i do the newspaper trick and mulch etc.,. it is to create a 'no-dig' bed as digging the soil even after the grass seems to be dead could reinvigorate it. but eventually the nut grass loses out totally.

len

Thanks so much, folks, for the advice. I think I'll leave the plastic on thru summer, hoping the NC sun cooks the liriope. I'll concentrate on my other beds, then see what autumn brings. If I have to pay then for my sins, so be it. . . Never again will I leave grass under a hugelkultur!

Andy Lee, the guy who wrote the chicken tractor book suggested urinating on a bale of hay for about a month and then putting it on your garden in the winter for a big boost of nitrogen. so the urine might help more than anything.

That is a novel idea iceman. I imagine it would work with straw as well? We have a dozen bales of straw sitting in the garden paths - they were supposed to be mulch for the paths but we didn't get around to spreading them and now there's snow. Now I'm going to devise an experiment involving straw and pee...:)

Good luck with the liriope. Sounds like a constellation. We have gotten control of bindweed by letting it grow and flower so it's spending a lot of energy, then weeding it, getting every little rootlet.

The plastic (clear only) should help kill it in summer, but keeping it shaded from ANY sunlight should help the rest of the year. I have thought that one way would be to put still-bound whole bales of straw on stubborn plants, butting them tightly together like bricks. Just try getting sunlight though THOSE, sucker!

Sue

I've had the same issue with several plants (even an oak willow from my neighbor's yard that keeps producing off-shoots), and have tried so many methods to kill these things off, I cannot count it all. Here is what I've discovered works best for me: I got some regular syringes (I have a friend who is a doctor, but you can probably purchase online). I buy the concentrated Round-up formula. I then make a 1/2 gallon of heavy saltwater solution, and add the concentrated roundup solution to it--double to triple dosing it. I then cut all of the foliage down to the base, and uproot the plant in several areas as well (a must for those rooters!). I inject a syringe-full of the mixture into both the plant-base AND the roots. It works better than anything else I've ever done, although you DO have to be diligent and understand that you'll likely never get it all on the first try--so be prepared to do a couple of treatments. This has worked wonders for me on some extremely invasive plants.