I WANT TO KILL A WHOLE BED FULL OF FLOWER ROOTS...

We have a flowerbed against the southern wall of our garage. It gets no direct sunshine. So far it has a Crown of Thorns plant that likes it there. And I have several healthy hostas that would love it in that bed, which is filled with some of the prettiest compost/decomp you wanna see. The problem is that my DH insists on letting plants just roam, and this bed was filled with those green plants with the white tube-loking roots. Not very deep, but they had taken over this entire bed. He pulled all the greenery out by hand, and the bed is completely empty now, except I started digging today and it's filled with those white, cigar-shaped roots that spread all over a flowerbed. I dug up about a square foot area and almost 1/2 filled a small bucket with all those roots from just that small area. I thought about digging out the whole bed and trying to sift the root tubers out, but that would take too much of my time. I had another much smaller bed around two treees that was filled with the same plants. I dug out as many roots as I could find, and then covered the ground with gardeners cloth weed block. To date I've only had a few of these come peeking up outta that bed. I truly wanted to save that wonderful compost already in the bed. Please help me figure this one out. Thanks!

Linda

How deep do those roots go?

By what you are describing, if you leave them, the plants re-grow, so breaking them up by roto-tilling would only multiply the number of shoots.

I would probably find some large cardboard boxes and open them up to serve as a ground cover and temporary storage. Dig out the soil / compost mixture to the cardboard. Then screen it through some 1/2" hardware cloth to remove as much root as possible before returning it to the site.

Unfortunately lots of work. But it should remove the offending roots.

I

Thanks, Bubba!

That was my first thought too. Just didn't wanna have to do that much work, but...
I might put some weed block cloth down, after I dig out as much as I can, and sift the compost back onto the weed block. This worked with the small flowerbed I cleared out. Haven't had much break through activity.

My KW beans are growing slowly, but the Sugar snaps are languishing....beets growing, but I'm scared now that I've read somewhere about the beet leaf virus that could infect my EBs...may have to pull them up...Swiss chard growing slowly, too...

Pics on the weekend.