They have chemicals that only kill the grass and nothing else. are you digging by hand or using a tiller?

My experiences:

Round Up kills the grass and weeds grow back. It will be weeds in the spring. Annoying. Also, lots of neighbor kids (toddlers and preschoolers), including my own kids, run through my lawn and I don't want to be the jerk who poisoned them.

Digging and turning the soil is heavy work and a fine way to go, but it will till up seeds and you will have to keep weeding out grass and weed babies for some time. My usual method, but that's in the middle of the summer when I am off work and have the time and energy.

I had my happiest success with the lasagne method. Very very fertile in the spring and not as many problems with weeds as you might expect. A lot of work, but I think worth it.

I don't have much time this fall so I am thinking of covering the grass with thick wet newspaper then covering that with mulch (maybe a layer decomposing material from my compost bin before the mulch, but I don't have much yard waste yet). The grass will die and in the spring I can pull back the mulch where I want to plant. Hopefully it will be easier than digging and I will have fewer weed problems than with other methods.

Good luck!

Jen

Also: "Is it easier to dig through then?"

I think dry dead patches of grass are harder to dig through than live grass. The dead grass is hard and tends to compact itself.

Multiple tillings. Till, rake out the clumps, let itstad until the next crop start to shoot up, till again. Most weeds are annuals and if you don't let them reseed, they will eventually sprout themselves out of existence. If you start now, you will get another crop up this fall, then till in Oct and again in March. You could also put down a pre-emergent, like preem.

My sister uses the same method Jen described, and it has worked really well for her - newspapers and mulch now, then move the mulch aside in the spring to plant. She doesn't bother wetting it though; it will get that way the next time it rains, and the mulch will help keep it wet. You could use cardboard that way too. Doing it that way frequently increases your worm population due to the dampness of the soil, and worms are good for the soil. Lots of grocery stores have cardboard boxes for the taking.

I use Roundup, then till in some compost and peat moss. But I don't do it until the season I'm going to plant, so the newspaper/cardboard method wouldn't work for me.

Deanna

I use cardboard, obtained from a dumpster behind a Dollar General store a block from my home. Covered with mulch it lasts quite a while. Once it gets wet, it stays that way and is easy to dig holes through. Everything under it dies. Weeds and grass covered this way last fall are now just plain dirt.

This past spring, my DH and I turned a very steep lawn hillside into a rose garden. DH applied RU, and then we shoveled on a thick layer of oak mulch. About 3 weeks or so later, we planted over 100 bareroots. I haven't had any problems at all with weed/grass breakthrough and all the roses are doing great.