You might want to be cautious about bringing in large amounts of dirt. If the slab is higher than the yard, it generally means that rainfall will flow away from the house, and this is a good thing. Yes, you can use vinegar to kill weeds. I have done so, and it works. However, this method leaves a 6 inch diameter spot in the lawn, with dead grass, that will fill in and recover, eventually, in about two months. Stump removal is a big project, so I am guessing that it will take more than one year for you to get your yard to where you want it. That's not unusual. Given your location, it would be wise to learn what you can about plants that can get by with less water.

My advice is that you contact your local extension office to find some local information regarding weed control and lawn establishment. Foxtail control is rather specialized and it's important that you address it right away. Can't tell what kind of grass that is.

also the dead trunks will come handy when you prepare your vegetable beds (google hugelkultur). Likewise the stumps can be reused, or covered in place and planted. vegetable bed preparation and lawn preparation are different, although both will involve adding organic matter.

as far as the weeds are concerned, if you have to start over, what stops you from buying a small tiller and tilling the yard a few times (while, ideally, tilling in some organic matter) just before dry weather? you will have a dust bowl, but then you can reseed, say, this Fall for a nice winter growth. Places that have been weedy a long time have good soil, so you may be in luck after all. wait for the soil test to see how much OM you need, but then if you need it, add it now. You will never get another chance.

You still have time to get a vegetable bed in, you just have to hurry.. I just moved in my house and has something very similar to yours.. What I did do the vegetable bed was:

-weedwack/mow the weed/grass as close to the ground as you could
-cover weeds with a few layers of newspaper,leaves, anything that wil smother the grass
-get topsoil/compost delivered and pile that up ontop of the newspaper,leaves,etc.. Basically making a raised bed..
-mulch heavily with a couple of inches of leaves,etc
-plant!

If you are concerned about the grass/weeds coming through the newspaper/leaves you could add a layer of cardboard.. That with the soil/compost ontop will smother anything underneath it.. You could be planting in a couple of days with this method.. One day to prepare the bed, another day to plant out the bed! Don't give up, you still have hope! Grow you own food! Also, I would seriously consider planting fruit trees.. I wish I planted them 2 years ago when I moved here, would be having fruit soon, instead of waiting 5 years for a decent yield.. Don't give up, your not too late!

Best of luck,
Joe

!/4 acre is a lot of land so don't try to fix it all at once, prioritize. What do you want to do now?
A good reliable soil test should be your first step, because you cannot amend the soil properly without some idea of what your soil has or really plan well for grass without that knowledge.
I would be much less concerned about the foxtail since this summer annual can be kept under some control, for now, simply by mowing. Since this spreads largely by seeds it may not be possible to completely eliminate it from your yard if there are patches growing where you have no control.
Take some time to get aquainted with that property, where is the sun when? How well does the soil drain? Where does excess water flow?

Here is a link that might be useful: About Hugelkultur

To locate your county's Extension Service office, use this map

http://www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/

Here is a link that might be useful: locate your county's Extension Service office

Try adding woodchips for the garden area tree companys have them all the time and the time free .its good organic mattter for the garden soil in the coming years.do a google search edens garden there is a great video what he did and it amazing .hope it helps and take soil sample this tell you what you need.

Find an expert gardener in your most immediate region and have them look at it. As you say, you don't have enough experience to figure out these issues in a few weeks let alone act on them all.

My advice is do not just start doing things (especially expensive things like trucking in soil) based on some ad hoc anecdotes from people on a gardening forum, most of whom know nothing specific about your climate, soil, and best-apapted plants.

The advice to go slow, learn the land and seasons, the sun fall, etc, is right.

And be careful what you wish for. Weeds keep the soil in much better shape than grass, in fact, ten years of weeds = good soil most of the time (not when I was living on sand, after ten years you still have mostly sand, but definitely in clay). Likewise, all dead wood can be put to good use, without having a truck back up onto your lawn.

If this were my yard, my sequence of events would probably be the following. I phrase it as "do this", but that's just because typing, "If it were me, I'd do this" gets rather repetitive after a while. :)

I'd also recommend trying to find an organic landscaper who'd be willing to let you pay him for a few hours just to look over the place and make some recomemndations. Maybe you'll hire him to do some or all of the work, maybe that's not in the budget, but it would still be good to get a professional opinion, rather than discovering three years from now that you didn't think of something that has cost you a ton of work.

That said, my thoughts are:

- Pick a spot for a food garden (Recommendations: Full sun, and near the back door, though not so near that it'll get trampled when you fix the slab problem.) and get it started, while you're working on the other things below.

If there's any money left after considering all the spending I'm recommending below :), hire someone to put in two to four framed raised beds with nice high sides to maximize the soil depth smothering the grass/weeds, each bed perhaps eight feet long by four feet wide, with nice wide paths (absolute minimum two feet; three or four is better) between them and around the whole thing, the paths landscape-fabriced and fine-ground-bark-mulched, the whole thing boxed in with a weed barrier or, even more extravagantly, a flat strip of paving stones that you can run a mower over. Have some good soil delivered, buy some compost and manure, mix it all up, lay drippers for watering, and get started planting.

(Remember - NO TREATED WOOD FOR RAISED BEDS!)

If there isn't money for this lavish option or you don't want to commit a big bag of money to a permanent location while you're still laying out the lot, instead use one of the many techniques for "smothering" the ground. Still use beds, even though they won't be boxed, still make a nice wide path and a surrounding path, also smothered but not with bark because it'll get into the beds, and still confine the first garden to two to four four-by-eight beds.

(You can of course till and amend; I'm suggesting smothering because even if you till you're probably going to have to smother the ground _anyway_; it will be packed with weed seeds and possibly grass roots. But you could till, amend with compost and add some slow-release fertilizer, and then smother, and then you'll have the compost and fertilizer working for you and when you cut through whatever you're smothering with in order to plant, the soil will initially be soft.)

If you absolutely can't bear to restrain yourself from planting a bigger garden ("The landscaper's already _here_, after all! Are we really going to pay to have him come again next year?"), I'd recommend keeping the extra beds unplanted and covered in landscape fabric or weed paper or newspaper until you've experienced a few weeks of keeping two to four beds weeded. And in fact, even in the beds you're working you might want to use weed paper or even landscape fabric, this first year, to minimize the weeding load.

By the way, if anyone in your household has a rather short reach, you might want to make the beds three feet wide instead. The eight feet long is arbitrary - the length should logically be based on the standard lengths for the framing material for framed beds. For unframed beds, you could theoretically make the beds infinitely long but if they're longer than ten feet I will just about guarantee you that you'll find yourself stepping in them instead of walking around them. If you're thinking that you'll just step _over_ the beds, remember that late in the summer they may be a five-foot-high solid mass of tomato foliage.

I think it's perfectly possible to prep a couple of beds in time for a warm-weather garden. You'll have to buy tomato transplants and other things that take a long time to go from seed to seedling, but corn and cucumber and bean seeds don't go in until well into May, at least in my area. And then there's the fall garden afterwards.

- Meanwhile, get a contractor or a landscaper who does hardscape (and is appropriately licensed and knowledgeable about structural and drainage issues) in to look at the slab and height problem and make a proposal. Maybe get a couple so you have a couple of proposals to choose from. As someone else said, I would be wary of bringing in a lot of soil and possibly changing the drainage profile of the property. I'd be thinking of something more like a step or steps, or a retaining wall with steps - I'm not quite visualizing the situation. Then either hire the person to do the work, or file the proposal away and make your other decisions based on the fact that you'll be doing it when you can afford it.

- Hire someone to take out the yucca/trees/stumps, the boulders, the rotting wood, whatever part of the weird slab height thing the contractor wants gone, and so on. (If debating about the slab solution takes a while, you could still hire someone to do the rest of the cleanup.)

- Weedwhack and yank huge weeds and move large rocks that block a mower - or hire someone to do so - until most or all of the space is mowable, and then keep it mowed so that the huge unmowable weeds can't come back. I realize that it's not grass, but mowing is still often an adequate way to temporarily control weeds, and actually _killing_ the weeds is likely to be a long-term task, one that you don't want to set as your first task because it might be unfinished ten years later. :)

- At this point, again if I were you, I would not put in a lot of grass. You'll have a food garden, you'll have the jungle suppressed with regular mowing, and now, IMO, it will be time to get to know the property, and the weeds, a little better before you pick a place to put in more lawn. (And you'll be learning what your water bills look like. Grass is thirsty.)

At my house, we have a fraction of the amount of space that you have, and we still have flower and shrub borders several feet deep surrounding two modest lawns. (I'd still like to take out half the existing lawn space, but The Guy objects. :))

There are a bazillion non-lawn options. You could put in a mini-orchard of fruit trees with mowable clover underfoot. A berry hedge. An herb garden. A perennial or annual cutting garden. An asparagus bed. A bulb garden covered in some low-care ground cover. A mixed perennial border. A bigger vegetable garden space for corn and pumpkins and other big crops or if you want to dryfarm. (Dryfarming involves growing vegetables with little to no water, much wider spacing, and meticulous weed control.)

Even if you decide that all you want to work is a modest food garden, your water bills might convince you to fill the rest of the space with something other than grass - and once grass is in, it's a nightmare to get out. Hours to scuff the ground and sprinkle seed, but possibly years of regret afterward.

So I'd suggest that you _maybe_ put in a modest lawn near the back door if the existing lawn space that you mention is in the wrong place, and just keep mowing down the weeds for a while as you think about your next options.