Well, here in Texas orange oil can be found in most organic nurseries or gardening stores, and also some stores like Home Depot carry it (once you find their tiny organic section). But I don’t know about your neck of the woods… If it comes to it you could order it online. Howard’s new site has it for sale from Medina (a great company that has a long history producing soil-nourishing products and amendments):

http://www.green-living.com/or.....trate.aspx

It will be somewhat more expensive than, say, Home Depot, but then again you’ll be supporting good people doing good work.

As for your question about grass, wish I knew the answer to that one too Some grasses that don’t spread underground can just be carefully pulled out from moist loose soil, but heinous weeds like bermuda that spread underground are the worst… If you try pulling it out you could very well tear out your other plants too, and the bermuda will come back anyway. With those types of grasses, every segment that is underground can turn into a new grass plant so unless you somehow removed every single bit of it, it will still come back. The worst thing you could do is till or chop up the soil with the grass in it, because you’ll just vastly multiply your problems.

You could try the vinegar spray if you make, say, a cardboard shield that you can maneuver between your plants and the grass so you don’t spray the plants. You could also try snipping off the grass at ground level, then putting down a thin layer of compost (maybe 1/2 inch), adding some diluted liquid molasses (or dry molasses), covering with a good layer of newspaper or cardboard, wetting thoroughly, then covering with mulch. The idea being to stir up enough biological activity in the soil to rot the sunlight-starved grass. It would be a pain to try to do this between a bunch of plants but might be worth trying.

Be careful with the liquid molasses (or use dry molasses instead) because too much could hurt the roots of your other plants. Used moderately it is a great fertilizer for plants since the sugar feeds microbes that take nitrogen from the air and make it available to plants.

If the grasses are spreading into the bed from outside then some sort of steel or brick barrier that extends a few inches underground might help too.

Anyway, good luck. Love your site by the way!

How do you get rid of grass that is growing under and among your plants. I have dug up many a plant lately and pulled the grass out around the plant. Getting very tiresome. Anna

You can make your own inexpensive vinegar weedkiller as follows:

1 gallon 10% grain vinegar (NOT acetic acid, that kind is from petroleum)
1 oz orange oil
1 oz molasses
small squirt of non-toxic soap (like Dr Bronner’s)

The molasses really is optional. Be careful with the orange oil. It is a strong solvent (its purpose here is to soften the plant tissue so the vinegar can get into it and be more effective- it can also burn plant foliage on its own at high enough concentrations). But, by the way, if you dilute it properly with water it makes an effective, great-smelling kitchen cleaner, or a cleaner to remove mold from a house, among other uses.

This mixture works on the foliage of the plant so green growing foliage will be more vulnerable to it. You will probably find that you will be much more successful on a hot, dry, sunny day than a cool overcast one. It’s important to play around with those variables to find what conditions work best. When you get it right, it will kill a plant within hours. If you don’t get it quite right, it may take days. Also, with certain tough weed grasses (like bermudagrass), you may turn it brown but it’s merely gone dormant. At some point it may ‘wake up’ and turn green again, or resprout from the rhizomes. You have to keep at it… or pull it out/mow it/learn to live with it.

Note that this mixture shouldn’t be stored in a pump sprayer because the vinegar will attack the seals.

Howard Garrett is a good source of info for organic gardening in general. He’s got great organic programs for trees, vegetables, etc on his website: http://www.dirtdoctor.com