Need to know where you live to help. If you live in Anchorage the answer will be different than if you live in Panama. You don't necessarily need to use chemicals to renovate a yard. Will need to know what kind of grass you want and if shade is involved. In the mean time the best thing you can do for your dogs and soil is to cover the ground with several inches of shredded bark mulch. Dogs seem to like mulch well enough. It will absorb all the urine you can splash on it. You can bury the poop in it if you want to. It helps keep the underlying soil moist until you get around to grass again. I would start with 2 inches of mulch. And it is usually easy to pull weeds out of loose mulch as long as you get the weed pulled before the root digs into the underlying soil. You can do your weeding with a hoe.

The tree of heaven is a nightmare. I am obsessed with the trees! Everytime I see one I want to cut it down. I hate seeing them along rt. 78. My husband now is obsessed with them and says they are even growing in NYC - where he works. My father hates them also so we diligently cut every female tree down as soon as possible but they seed so rapidly you can't keep up. Our neighbors don't cut theirs down so they end up seeding our property. My husband thought that since it's such a hard tree to cut down (seeminly like a dense hardwood) he would dry it and burn it for firewood. It was worthless. It's a totally useless tree - it stinks when you cut it or pull a seedling out of the ground and sucks up all the water out of the ground - stealing it from other plants! About the Japanese stilt grass. It's a nightmare to control. We just can't keep it under control at all and hope that the sheep we are going to get will eat it. It chokes out all of our redwood oak seedlings we plant for our reforestation activity. I'm wondering if crown vetch will choke it out or if the stilt grass with choke out the c.v. We used to have multiflora rose growing in abundant but we finally got rid of them. Thanks for letting me vent! :) Any help you can offer with control ideas - please pass on. thx.

There is one type of ragweed which, when in flower, looks very similar to a Goldenrod. That is perhaps what they have pictured. It is supposedly the type which produces the largest amount of pollen which causes such misery to allergy suferers. It's biological name is 'Ambrosia artemisiifolia' and if you Google 'Ambrosia artemisiifolia poisonous plant' you'll see a pic.

It would be helpful to see the entire plant. In spite of that missing detail, I'll suggest that it's nutgrass. If so, you can win the game if you are persistent. You must always remove it when it has only 4 leaves. The idea is to starve those nutlets and not allow new ones to develop.