Sorry for the long question here.

I have an area of my yard that was overrun with I suppose you'd call them weeds before I bought my house. It was so overrun that the first time we saw the house we didn't know there was a shed back there (and it's about 8 feet tall) nor did we see a huge hollow tree stump.

I've cleared out the area over the past year, and actually started a vegetable garden in part of it, which (to my surprise, as it's my first one) is doing wonderfully.

So here's the issue: areas where I laid down weed barriers (newspaper, cardboard, and a lot of cut grass) tend to control the weeds pretty well, although certainly not perfectly. Areas where I did not are obviously full of weeds.

I'm thinking that my next step is to lay some sod (my grass is Zoysia). I've googled around and read about preparing a weedy area for sod (water, spray, till, water, spray, till . . .), but I have to think that, given how long this part of the yard was ignored, there's simply no way that I'll kill all the weeds that way, at least not in my lifetime.

So what I don't understand is why the sod wouldn't act as a natural weed barrier, since the point of those barriers (as I understand them) is to block the sun from the seeds.

This area of the lawn doesn't need to be perfect, or even close, but I'd like to make it better. So if I was just to till and lay down sod, would you think it would prevent *most* of the weeds from coming back?

Tilling causes a myriad of problems. The first one you will notice is that it stirs up buried weed seeds, brings them to the surface, and they sprout. The second problem is that it fluffs up the soil unevenly. In three years you will be complaining of a bumpy lawn after the fluffy soil settles.

The way you kill everything is with a product called Round Up (or anything containing glyphosphate). Spray it one time and it will kill everything. Water daily after you spray and the weed seeds that are there will sprout. A week later you can spray glyphosphate again and kill all the new weeds. Then you are ready to lay the sod. Tilling is the worst thing you can do to prep for sod.

If you only want to kill the weeds and keep the existing zoysia, use a product called Weed-B-Gone. It will kill broad leafed weeds like dandelions.