Maybe an Erodium.

No need to hand pull. Just hit it with a broadleaf herbicide - they can be found at any big box store. Look for 2,4-D and dicamba on the label. Repeat applications may be needed.

Dandy, in general we never rototill a lawn or in preparation to install a lawn. Rototilling is a bad idea for several reasons, but the big one for the average lawn is that it results in a bumpier and bumpier surface for up to 3 years. The reason is the soil always settles unevenly after rototilling. In a garden you won't notice it, but when you're bouncing your mower over it instead of rolling it, you'll notice every week. Uneven surface is a common issue in the forums.

Sounds like you're hell-bent on tilling something.

Your best bet is chemical control, it will kill the weed so it won't spread. Get yourself a sprayer( the 2 gallon RoundUp sprayer from Lowe's has a pressure release as opposed to others) and some broadleaf herbicide, mix according to instructions and start spraying, you'll be done in a few minutes. The sprayer will come in handy year after year( not just for the lawn, think bug/spider control - a $10 pack of WP Demon will take you through the year), and depending on how much surface you're covering the herbicide should last a good while too.

Morpheuspa and I both have some problems with rototilling for any purpose. For lawns it's an easy call once it's explained why the soil settles unevenly. I didn't explain it above, I just stated it. If you want more of our take on tilling, please ask. I'd go into it now but it can get lengthy, so I'd rather not take up all the space if you don't want it.

@dchall_san_antonio

I'd like to read it. It goes against a couple thousand years of agricultural best practices. From early times man has hooked up a horse to a plow - wood or metal - and proceeded to break the soil before seeding, if you have evidence that practice is wrong that would be quite astounding.

I don't want to get too distracted from the topic, but I think dandy has her answer.

j4, Let's call it 10,000 years of plowing, and you can even call it a best practice. Where is the evidence that plowing is the best method for preparing the soil to start new crops? Has anyone studied alternative methods on an academic basis? I'm not trying to say that no studies have been done, I'm just not aware of them. When I first heard of no-till ag it was with respect to cotton grown in the Texas Panhandle. Rather than killing the cotton plants after harvest and removing them, the plants were left in the ground year after year. The result was the plants developed root systems and fungal root multipliers that allowed the plants to go with extremely minimal irrigation. Most years they went unirrigated with only the natural rainfall. I had also seen a no-till test done at Penn State using corn and showing the corn seemed to do better under no-till management. That was at least 10 years ago when the Internet was much less populated with stuff. But these are two anecdotes. Surely someone is doing research into plowing and no-till.

Very interesting. It would seem reasonable to me that fluffing up the soil and breaking up compaction would make it easier for the plant to root, increase oxygen in the soil, help mix in organic matter, kill the weeds and make it easier for the water to get in, but then like you said, some people are getting just as good results with no till. Will have to do some more reading. I guess it would have to be a long term study since it may work fine for 3-4 years and then yields could start to decline.

I don't know man has been plowing for 10,000 years. Let's assume that is the case. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the eons of plant life that has thrived across the world without plowing.

The forests and fields of the world were not plowed by Mother Nature. The tropical jungle didn't pop up because someone decided to disturb the soil and mix in some cow manure, now did it?

When the conditions are right, things will thrive. When conditions change, things that can't adapt will weaken and/or die. Such is the way of life.

All that being said, there is absolutely nothing natural about agriculture or lawns. it does make sense to do something up front to get the conditions right for the foreign plant you want to plant. Eg tilling in some organics and amendments might be a good route to take if you soil sucks and you are starting from scratch. But I don't think it would be good to do this every time you see something wrong, like a weed taking over. There are more appropriate solutions.

One reason in favor of plowing, tilling, or "drilling" seed is to bury it out of sight of seed eating birds. In nature the grasses have simply produced so much seed that the birds can't eat it all. When the herbivores come along and trample the seed onto the surface, there's traditionally been enough to go around. But for farmers trying to concentrate production of single crops, a few flocks of birds can cut into their profit.

In 2014 I bought a house with a neglected yard. There was about 30 square feet of St Augustine and 7,300 square feet of weeds. It never entered my mind to till in organics or amendments. The weeds provide organic roots in the soil, so there is plenty of organic matter already there. Tilling would only stir up the roots and bury the surface plant tissue. The microbes necessary to decompose these parts of the plant are located where the plant parts normally live. When you rototill you're bringing the depth loving microbes to the surface and burying the surface loving microbes. What good does that do?

I think we all understand that soil develops into a structure. What that means is the microbes that belong at depth populate at their depth stratum while the surface dwellers thrive where they are adapted. It also means the microbes cause the sand, silt, and clay particles to bond and align which allows capillary forces to move water around. Both water and air move in and out of the soil through these invisible channels. When you till the soil it destroys the channels and turns them into fluff. When you look down on it the soil takes on moisture in a different way. Rather than moving down deep into the soil, moisture clogs the soil at the surface with muck (technical term). It can take years to rebuild a soil structure, so the common practice of annual plowing or tilling simple prevents the soil from forming a good structure. Microbes never have a chance to populate in the numbers needed to create healthy soil and you're left with a soil depleted of organic matter. This is what they found in the cotton fields I mentioned earlier. The no-till cotton formed a micorhizal (fungal root) system that was much larger than the plants' actual root systems. The fungus attaches to the roots and sends hyphae (root like appendages) out many feet in all directions into the soil. The fungus and roots live symbiotically where the plant provides sugars to the fungus and the fungus provides moisture, NPK, and micronutrients to the roots. When the plant dies, gets pulled out, or plowed in, all that glorious symbiosis ends and has to start over with the next gen of plants.

The large farmers that do no-till have a different set of concerns than the small gardener. Soil erosion would be one, cost of tilling large surfaces would be another. Since the soil isn't tilled, weed control becomes a problem, which the farmers solve with large amounts of chemicals. In the garden, you're supposed to apply liberal amounts of mulch to keep the weeds under control and prevent the soil from crusting over in a no till situation. Sure we talk about how plants thrive on their own in nature, but a garden is not a natural environment, it is a controlled environment where we try to give a very limited set of plants an artificial advantage over all other native plants. I understand no till is widely used in large agriculture, but the fact it greatly increases the amount of chemicals used on the crops concerns me. I think if you have a small garden tilling is a great way to achieve weed control, aerate the soil and mix in amendments. It has disadvantages as well, but overall I think you come out on the plus side.

"My feeling is that if we're doing something that Mother Nature does not do, then the natural way is likely to be easier and have some performance or environmental benefit.."

I think that we have to remember Mother Nature does not have any kind of agenda or direction, things just happen, and sometimes the results are better, worse or just good enough. One example would be the optical nerves and blood vessels running in front of the optical receptors in our eyes. Much better than nothing, but no one would consider running their HDMI and antenna cables in front of their TV screen as ideal. Another would be the laryngeal nerve that instead of going straight from the brain to the larynx - a few inches at most, goes does into the chest, wraps around a major artery next to the heart and comes back up the neck. That's about 12 feet out of the way for a giraffe. Point is, things in nature are not always perfect, even though they are functional. We have the intellectual capacity to improve on Mother Nature's work to our advantage, and it's not a bad thing.