It might be recommended to loosen your soil in some parts of the world and in some forums, but I certainly don't make that suggestion. By softening, are you referring to rototilling? That's a big no-no. I don't have a sprinkler system in San Antonio and have managed to maintain St Augustine in a lot worse climate than Houston. The only problem that will wipe out St Augustine is not watering long enough when you water. The amount of water needed for St Augustine also happens to be the amount of water needed for bermuda if you want the bermuda to look nice. If you don't care whether the bermuda looks nice, then you can get away with no water at all. THAT is where bermuda differs from St Aug. St Aug dies without water while bermuda only goes dormant. Bermuda will not grow immediately to the north of south-side fences, so find a different solution for that location. Something else you might consider is calling in a landscaper. Oops! Never mind. Just reread that part about the budget. Rather than scalping the lawn, rent a verticutter, power rake, or slit seeder. Any one will work. These machines will barely cut into the surface of the soil but they remove all the plants. Then rake or blow all that stuff away before seeding. After you seed, roll the seed down with a rented roller. It is very important to get good contact with the soil. Now the most important suggestion I can give you is to WAIT TO SEED BERMUDA until late May or June when the soil is fully warmed up. Seeding bermuda now is a waste of seed and time. In the mean time sit on your hands. Find a copy of The Bermuda Bible online and memorize it. The author, Texas-Weed, will be along here soon and reply to this with additional, and perhaps conflicting, tips for you. He's the man when it comes to bermuda, though.

Yes, definitely mare's tail. It should come right up with a good tug.

One of your plants is Motherwort, Leonurus cardiaca . Yellow flower - Lysimachia punctata perhaps First one may be Solidago, Goldenrod.

Sod is often attached to (actually grown through) a plastic netting as it hold the rolls or sheet together during transport and installation. Hydroseeding is just spraying in a slurry of grass seed, fertilizer and some sort of cellulose stabilizer - no netting involved. You want raised beds to be in contact with the underlying soil - no gravel or weed cloth. Smothering the existing growth with overlapping layers of cardboard is easy and effective and it will decompose in time, allowing the roots of the raised bed plants to penetrate down as deeply as they like. Using a prepared herbicide according to label directions is really the best way to approach weeds in the lawn, particularly if there are more weeds than lawn. In fact, if it is really bad, razing the entire lawn and starting over may be the simplest way to go. As long as you don't spray any herbicides (plant killers) directly on what you are going to eat (and if you think about, it that makes no sense anyway!!), then there is really very little concern. Most of these products breakdown in the soil quite rapidly with rain/irrigation and the activity of the soil biology into harmless elements and they are not taken up into the plants or fruit. Weeds in dedicated planting beds that already contain valuable or desired perennials and shrubs are best handled with manual removal to avoid damaging the desired plants - herbicides can't tell the difference between a weed or anything else that might be growing :-) If you do not intend to add any plantings in these areas right away, then smothering with cardboard will work well too, at least for most weeds. Cover the cardboard with a good thick layer of mulch to keep it damp and hasten decomposition. And mulch any other bare ground after removing any weeds. Mulch is about the best weed suppressor there is and is of multiple benefits to the garden.