Experience with Couch Grass.

Pahiatua Star and Eketahuna Advertiser, Volume 6, Issue 563, 23 November 1891, Page 4

Experience with Couch Grass.

A correspondent over the signature of '• I'anax " write* on tine subject as follow*, but lie omit* to state what Ta : sly . f cn« be designate* •• couch ” »r» ■. several Franses going by that l.siur being grown by settlers in difle..ir jeiits of this colony:—A year •go 1 believed, with a late corresponderit rt yours, that a man might as wc il t*y to ** put out the sun with a pair rf snuffers " as to kill couch by burying it; and in pursuance of this view, having a very foul couchy piece of bind, but convenient for a garden, I roiumenred to pile up the sods ready for drying or burning them ; but in* .lependently of the toll of lifting these

ton* of i arUi breast high. I soon found that this greedy grasa had possessed itself of all the goodness of the soil, and when the couch was taken out, nothing worth saving was left. I therefore tiied another plan. I threw out one rpit and the subsoil also, leaving a deep trench along the line of en>nuil. Into tins, face down, I put tin next line of sods, cut in regular ire, about 1 foot square, no chinks l«n>g left to admit air to the buried grass, and then put the subsoil on top. Tins had a very neat look, but I was well aware its snugness was not to be trusted, and in a very few weeks the dark green pipes of the young stole* catue up. seeking air. to carry life down to the buried mass. No " masterly activity" will answer now. The hoe must cut off all the messenger* from below without disturbing the sods, lined off from time to time, they soon put on that yellow hue which is the sign of death in the vegetable kingdom. This spring I was digging the soil so treated last vear, and the loose, fibrous, much euriclied .soil would hare gladdened the heart of any gardener, living fto per cent at least latter tlmn it was before tbe couch got into it, it showed me what a bleasing this creeping glutton is when made to surrender its manufactured riches to our uses, although 1 did not think so at the first digging. Any surface crop may be taken after the growth is virtually killed, if the hoeing is still relentlessly kept up, os neither couch or any other plant can live if continuously deprived of air.— flreytown Standard.