Better to have done that last fall. That grass will keep coming back unless you kill it. Chemicals will do it, if you don't mind using chemicals. Otherwise, cook it to death by covering with plastic. Problem is, it'll take some time, when you want to be setting out your plants.

Elbow grease is the best way to remove grass and weed debris. Go out after a good rain when the ground is soft. Turn those grass clods upside down and bury the green part, leaving the roots exposed. It'll croak, enriching the soil at the same time.Follow with any kind of mulch to discourage new sprouts. Keep pulling the weeds/grass that push through mulch.

My best flower bed was made with the neighbors torn up sod.
Good Luck!

Well, I've already put most of the clods in a trash bag. I suppose I can dig some of the big ones out. Thanks for the advice!

Trash bag?!?? Horrors!

Do you mean that you aren't going to compost all that good organic material? You'll want to be able to add compost to your veggie garden later.

Better, perhaps, but not necessary. We haven't all got the same schedule, so better to do it now, in this case. A few general observations, and then some detail.

I'll preface this by saying that what I will write is what I might do. There are a lot of very knowledgeable people here who will have other ideas and will hopefully contribute. You'll have to decide what works best for your situation and abilities. With luck, I'll learn a lot too.

It's hard to tell from the picture, but that looks to be about 6' square or so. A good beginning to a 200 sq.ft. garden... we'll see how you feel tomorrow. In general, people aren't accustomed to the amount of exercise building a garden entails, so going at it in small bites is a good policy. 6 more days like this one and you'll have your 200 sq.ft.

Those bags you filled? you don't want that stuff in your soil, but you also don't want to take it out, because it's LOADED with nutrition for your plants. That's why so many people compost. You can mix it all up and put it in a pile somewhere and in a fairly short amount of time it will be ready to put back in the garden. An alternative, if you don't want a pile of stuff sitting in the yard for 3 months, is to bury it in the garden, and put the other soil on top. In new gardens, there is generally a good amount of humus and organic matter in the top layers of soil already, but as your plants grow, and the roots get deeper, some of them will respond very well when they discover that stuff decomposing down below. In your case, it would be fine to bury leaves and twigs and such, but grass and roots, not so much. Compost and organic matter are the best tools you have for building a vigorous garden that will grow really nutritious and good tasting food.

It is true that grass is pretty tough to beat out of the garden, but it can be done. Thy key is building good soil, and perseverence. By building good soil, I mean, in this case, tilth. Grass is used for lawns because it forms a dense vigorous root system that can stand a lot of wear. It can regrow from a small piece of root, so it is tough to remove completely. The easiest way to weed out grass is to have very soft soil, making it easy to pull. There are plenty of other weeds that, for one reason or another, can be equally difficult, and you'll likely meet many of them, but grass can be a real bear to wrestle with.

When I dig a new bed in lawn, I use two tools - a square bladed spade, and a digging fork. Mine are sharp, heavy, rugged, and expensive - not typical of what most gardeners buy starting out, but they are nearly 20 years old and still working hard for me. I like the spade because it cuts sharp straight lines through the sod. I use it to cut a line along one side of the area I'm going to work - in the example of a 10' x 20' garden, I'd cut a ten foot line. Some people like to start in the middle, and work their way out in a kind of square spiral, that's fine too. At either end of that line, I would turn the shovel 90 degrees and make a perpendicular cut, just the width of the shovel. At the end of that cut, I would do another 90 degree turn, and cut a second line to parallel the first, 10' long. As I work my way down that second line, every foot or so - about the length of the blade of the spade, I cut a perpendicular line to connect the two 10' lines in a series of blocks.

When I get to the end, I pick my fork. For the first bite, I put the fork at a 45 degree angle with the tines pointed at the other end of the bed, and push it all the way in. I then push down on the handle, and this will lever the block of sod up out of the ground. Trying to just lift it is tough, because the dirt is heavy and the roots are holding it down, If you don't make the initial cuts, the roots hold it horizontally as well as vertically, and the sod is pretty much impossible to lift. Now you should have a nice fat pyramid of dirt, full of roots, with one grassy side. You want to keep the dirt, but not the grass and roots. This is one reason the fork is good - it's not as heavy as the shovel, and the dirt falls through the tines. Give it a good shake. Then throw the clump as hard as you can back in the hole. Stab it through the grassy side and shake it again. Kick it if you feel like it. The idea is to loosen that rats' nest of grass roots so it lets go of most of that dirt, but to retain, as much as possible, the not of roots and grass, which will soon be compost. Take that mass of plant matter and put it in your collection bag - you're on your way. Now you have a ten food path of sliced grass with a slanted dirt hole at one end. Put your fork back in the same point where you took your first bite, but this time push straight down, and lever up the other half of the block. This pyramid won't have much grass, but there will still be a mass of roots just daring you to abuse it. Because there is no grass, it will fall apart more easily, so be a little more careful about shaking too many roots back down into your garden. Put the roots in the bag. The next block is a little bit different. This time, because you removed the sod in front of it, you can slide your fork horizontally under the mat of sod, about 2" down. Once the tines are all the way in, use the fork as a lever again, pushing down and then up to break the hold of the roots on the soil. Because this is a fairly thin slice, it should be a little easier to lift,but those roots are still strong so it's not easy. Some people prefer to do the same thing, but with the spade, which makes a nice clean cut, but isn't anywhere as handy for shaking the clump of sod, and leaves all those sliced off roots just a few inches away from finding he sun again. Use the tools you have at hand, but do your best to get most of the soil back into the garden and most of the roots out.

Now you have 2 blocks removed. Take your fork, stand on top of the next piece of sod you're about to remove, and turn around and look at the nice clean-cut hole you just made. Smile. Don't think about how much more you have to go. Then stab your fork straight down into the dirt right at the edge of the sod you're goung to cut next, and lever the soil up by pushing the fork handle down and back. This will bring up all of the roots that were underneath the last piece of sod. They go in the bag. The dirt stays. do this again in the first area you dug. Now you have nice deep loose soil. If you step on it, your foot sinks in. That is how you want your garden beds to be (maybe not quite that soft, but close). Soil with that little compaction allows roots to grow easily, so your plants will have an easy time finding nutrients, water will drain well, air will be retained, and the soil will warm up faster. Just as importantly, once the soil is loosened like that, it is much easier to pull out weeds and get almost all of the roots. With soft soil, perseverence, and a method of keeping the lawn from invading the garden, it isn't that hard to get the grass out for good.

Back to the task at hand. Keep sliding your fork under the slabs of sod, prying it up, shaking it out, and saving the grass and roots in the bag. DON'T keep digging up the second layer until you get to the end of the row. First pick up the bag. Move it to the other end of the garden, or if you are going to start a compost pile, bring it there now. Start a new bag before that one gets too heavy to move. Then go back to your trench with the nice straight lines and start forking up the roots, starting in the area where you first dug and working backwards till you get to the end, same routine, roots in the bag, dirt stays. In New England, this method will produce a collection of stones, thicker roots, and various other artifacts. I generally sort these into different piles. I remove stones that are larger than a peach pit, and large flat rocks or stones big enough to build with go in separate piles, but if you haven't got 50 acres to mess around in that can get complicated. Find a place out of the way to put them until you have a plan or a project that will get them out of the way for good, or put to good use.

The bags of grass and roots will be viable for several weeks if you just leave them like that, and it looks like you have plenty of grass, so you want to drown them. Pour a generous amount of water in both bags, tie them shut, and leave them alone. If you want, you can fill them with more grass and roots first, but they aren't going to move for a while, so don't add the water unless they are in a place where they can stay for about 2 weeks. That will kill the grass, and then you can add it back into the garden or into the compost pile.

That's enough for one day. Take a break. If you feel OK, do it again tomorrow, or take a few days. The important thing is to do a good job of what you do, and stop before you get tired or sore. Once you get tired, you stop paying attention, and if you're sore, it can't be fun. The enjoyment is, for most people, not in the digging, but in seeing what you got done, and that is why straight lines and uniform soft soil is important. You're making something that will help you nurture life, both the plants and your own, so it makes sense to do it well, thoughtfully, and with foresight. I dig my beds deeply two years in a row, the second year I sift the soil, so nothing bigger than 1/4" is left. It's a ridiculous amount of work at first, but they never need tilling again, so it saves a lot more work in the future. Parts of my garden are 30 years old an I'm still using the same beds I made in the beginning.

Thank you all for your responses.

@ Ralleia--Haha, no sorry, I wasn't going to throw them out. I put everything in trash bags because I didnt have any other place to store it at the time. I think I have a plan now though. My kids have a very large plastic toy box in the back yard that was being used to store backyard toys. They havnt used it in ages and probly never will again so I'll empty that out and use it to store my compost. It even has a lid that pulls down!! Also, I'm not exactly sure how to compost, still reading up on that.

@ bi11me--I only dug up a small area for now knowing that I can expand it if necessary. It's so hard being married to a pecimist!! LOL. My husband isnt too keen on the idea of me digging up a big portion of the yard when I dont even know yet if I can grow anything. It's ok though, I'll do what I have to do to have the best garden I can possibly have. Anyway, as far as digging, I took my weed whacker and beat the ground to death with the lines so it could remove as much grass as possible. I have a garden tool (not sure what its called) that has 2 long spikes on each end and 2 in the middle and when you stab the teeth into the ground, you twist it and it pulls up all the grass/weeds, which is what I used to actually do the digging. The ground was pretty soft from all the rain we have gotten lately but it wasnt muddy. Just easier to dig up. I also have a garden cultivator that I thought I would use to loosen up the soil even more and it is also good for grabbing roots and yanking them up as well. The method you use for digging your garden sounds great but I'm not sure if its feasible for me to do it that way. I'll give it a shot and see how it goes! I supposed I should have started this a long time ago but at that point, I wasn't sure that I wanted to have a garden. It wasnt until the end of January that I realized how much I want to do this, and I'd rather not dig the bed now and then wait until fall to plant--but--I dont want to use chemicals to kill the grass either. Maybe I'll just have to spend alot of time pulling new weeds/grass sprouts as they come up?? I'll get as many roots out of the bed as possible before I plant anything and try to make sure I have really clean root/debris free soil. I work full time so I wont be able to do anything else in the garden until Friday. Thanks again!!!

Just a thought. Bill's way is good, but extremely HARD work. Not that that's a bad thing, but it can become overwhleming to the point of discouragement, as he pointed out. You might want to do it his way in areas where you are going to plant beans or greens, onions, or lettuce: plants that are planted closely together and so must have large areas of cleared soil. Then in areas where you are planting crops that area spaced more than a foot apart, say, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons, etc. TRY THIS:

Measure out an area(s) that is about three feet square and clear it according to Bill's way. Amend it(them) well and pile the soil in that area up into a hill if you are planting cucs, squash or melons. Then use your weed eater to scalp all the rest of the ground in that area. Cover the entire area (hills too) with a ten sheet thickness of newspaper, wetting it down so it doesn't blow away. Be sure to get absolutely full coverage. Don't leave any cracks or seams and weight the edges down with rocks or soil, etc. Then cover the newspaper with an organic mulch for appearance's sake and for extra weight on the newspaper. Now cut a small hole(s) in the center of the three feet square(s) and plant your seeds or tomato transplants. The plants will come up and run or spread out over the heavily mulched area. The newspaper will keep down the vast majority of weeds and grass for you this first season. Come fall, cover the area with cardboard and layer on about a foot of organic matter to rot in. By next spring, the grass will be gone and you'll have the prettiest soil you ever saw.

So then, next year, plant your beans, etc. in the area you did the newspaper on this year, and do the newspaper trick again next year for those squash and tomatoes.

I read about this technique in a book on ornamental shade gardening. I have tried it several times and it absolutely does work.

No matter how you go about it, clearing land for gardening takes a lot of work. But it is worth it. And as Billme says, there's a strong sense of satisfaction from seeing what your work has made! Just don't expect it to be the last bit of work you do to keep that area clear. There will be weeding and mulching. Anyway, you can combine methods and rent a rototiller, till up your area, then smother any potential weeds with a mulching as Donnabaskets outlined. The tiller saves on some back-break, incorporates your grass down into your soil, and the mulch helps with it trying to ressurect itself.

And don't worry, while all your crops may not come to fruition during this steep part of your learning curve, some of it will. The pessimist will sing a different tune when eating a fresh tomato out of your lovingly cultivated garden. :)

Oh, but if you cook fresh produce check it for doneness sooner than you might normally... Things like green beans cook faster when straight from the garden rather than straight from the store. I still remember my sadness at cooking my first beans to olive-drab mushiness (mmmm, just like from the school cafeteria).

See? I told you there would be lots of opinions. My method is a variation an what is known as double digging, donnbaskets advocates deep mulch/lasagna style, sunnibel is a fan of rototilling. All work well, and can be appropriate depending on your time, strength, availability of materials, finances, etc. Take the time to research the terms you learn here, both on these forums and on the WWW, and eventually you will find a method that suits all of your needs. I like my method because it provides fertility and good tilth right from the get go. Lasagna methods and mulches are a little slower, and can require more materials initially, but are very effective for killing of the existing vegetation in a large area and returning those nutrients to the soil. Tilling is also fast and effective, but requires the machine itself, which can really beat you up worse than digging on hard soil and thick grass, and often requires more frequent cultivation, or repeated tilling, in order to really knock back stoloniferous or rhyzomatous growth. If you read my posts, you'll see I'm a bit of a fool for digging - I've easily done an hour of shoveling for every day of my life - so bear that in mind.

Well, if I had a toy box like that I would drill holes into it and find some red wigglers and use it as a worm bin for my compost. Worms are pretty easy and my kids love it when we go digging through the worms (even the almost 14-year-old who wants me to believe he is now too old for that stuff).

Which ever method you choose -- lasagne, double digging, tilling -- I'm sure you'll do fine because you've got two of the most important ingredients for a successful garden: love and enthusiasm. I started out with a pessimistic husband, too. He didn't even want the garden to be in his view of the yard! And I started out not knowing if I could grow anything at all, or if it grew would it survive the critters and varmints? And if it survived all of that, would it taste any good? I kind of doubted it.

Now the garden takes up most of the yard, and part of my neighbor's land, so it's in FULL view, and my husband admires it constantly. We don't buy any veggies from the store anymore, not only because we don't need to, but because what I grow tastes SO much better than the store it's not even worth it.

One more method mentioned above that you can use this summer to enlarge the garden for next year is solarization. Wet a section of grass and lay down a sheet of clear plastic over it during the highest sun and greatest heat of the summer. This will kill the grass and weeds (and I've heard it just sends the micro organisms deeper down, to emerge back to the surface when you remove the plastic, so not to fear.)

Build your soil's health with organic methods, and you'll end up with some great tasting food this year, and I predict the garden will grow in size every year :)

Thanks everyone!! I cant wait to get back out there this weekend and do some more clearing!! I'm sure I can get my 8 year old out there with me. He still loves to dig!!

Do you think grub worms and rollie pollies will be an issue once I get my transplants in? While I was digging, I found one of each. The man at the garden center where I bought my seed starter mix and compost said that grub worms arent a problem unless you have like 10 of them per square foot. He also advised that I don't treat the soil for insects and bugs until I see whether I have a problem with them. I guess in this case, its not better to be proactive.

Definitely use the lasagna method recommended by Donnabaskets.
Here's why....
Less labor but more important better results

The other methods, you will be pulling grass out of your garden all summer and next year as well. For you, the most important ingredient for success is preparation!

Don't be in a rush to get your seedlings out until you have your plot free of grass.

Google "lasagne method" and read what others are writing about their experiences

Consider raised beds in that area and use a modified lasagna to fill them. The work you have done so far will not be wasted...THINK LASAGNA

Lol, I'm a fan of rototilling after having cleared my first gaden in clay soil by double digging. Billme is right about needing follow up after tilling for things that grow back from their roots- I actually weed and mulch, but not so heavily as Donnabaskets method. My garden is pretty large and getting larger, so finding that much mulch is not so easy or inexpensive for me. Last year I used a method that approximates strip tilling, where I alternated 3 ft wide, cleared rows with 3 ft wide paths of clover. That cut down a lot on my weeding and need for mulch, but it became obvious that it would work better if I cleared out the weeds from my path areas too before trying to make more permanent clover areas. So this year, heavy mulch, then fall clover planting.
I am mentioning all this as an example of how you can take multiple methods and combine them to suit yourself. Billme enjoys digging, DB enjoys mulching, and I actually enjoy pulling weeds. Oh, and about your rollie pollies, they generally just eat dead plant matter, and one lonely grub wouldn't make me run for the hills ( or pesticides) either. Your garden center guy was right, and passed up an oppertunity to sell you something you didn't need! Wow!

That looks an awful lot like bermuda grass. Good luck with digging it out especially if you're in clay.

Incidentally, Texas is an big place with at least 6-8 different soil areas. Might help if you narrow down where you are.