the saddest thing I ever seen was on my visit to the Meeks' garden. due to old age and poor health, their markers were faded away to naught and the weeds were as tall as bloomstalks in the older beds. You could see vigorous irises were fighting on, but the weeds won.
Will be watching and listening, Polly, for results of your experiment. a real problem here is a weed looks like some sort of filament runner low grower. wild viola? anyway, it chokes and overgrows the feet. I"m having trouble getting ahead of it and plan to try Preen this year. Up to now, the only way to get rid of it was meticulously removing the thread like filaments and digging every square inch of the whole bed that way.
with all of NC's golf courses, birds "drop" fertile bermuda seed everywhere! even though we have zoysia lawn, we also have bermuda volunteers everywhere you look. It's our biggest weed nasty. having had a bermuda lawn once, I can give this advice: dig the bed edges sharp and deep, forming a trench, then scalp the closest lawn edge, and always mow so the grass is thrown away from the bed. every time you see the runners crossing the trench, get out your mower or hand tools, because a string trimmer would fling bits into the bed, and every other bit would root. Then go after any bits that came up in the beds as soon as they were visible, diggin down at least six inches for as much of the roots as possible. Round up never completely worked, that blasted stuff always came back.
