I've recently moved from renting an apartment in a complex to renting a privately-owned duplex. It has a little (8 ft by about 15 ft) yard-ish thing right now that I would like to transform into a real yard. The owners won't pay for it, but would be fine with whatever I do to it. The problem is, right now the yard is completely overrun with weeds; everything else gets choked out by them. I don't know what kind of weeds, there's a variety of them. The other problem is that I live in Phoenix and the ground is very hard and dry so pulling the weeds by hand is going to be... difficult if not impossible. I've seen previous yard questions, but I am a special desert-dwelling snowflake and a little bit of a hippy, so I'm looking for more ideas than the "poison the whole thing" that I see in some of the other questions and also Phoenix-specific advice. [more inside]
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What is the best thing to do about all the weeds in my yard? There's hardly any grass remaining. [more inside]
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My Ryobi string trimmer doesn't feed well. Should I just buy a new head for it or try one of those alternative string trimmer heads? [more inside]
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Due to a surprisingly large amount of rain in the past few months, my lawn is absolutely bursting with weeds. What do I do? [more inside]
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