When it comes to coping with weeds, I prefer the lazy gardener’s approach.  What that entails is this, you observe Nature and do a couple things.  Recognizing that weeds produce a lot of seeds, you get them before they set seed/go to seed.  This can be spraying them, or weed whacking them down.  I like the approach of after doing this, you cover them with cardboard or newspaper, then mulch on top of that with a 3-4 inch layer of mulch material.  YWhat you are doing is burying the weeds and their dormant seeds.  I have heard that weed seeds can live up to 25 years!  so you will constantly battle them for at least several years before you can get ahead.  And one important point is that when you dig into the soil to get deep roots out, you are actually bringing up more weed seeds from below!  So they will also sprout soon, making your weeding more difficult.  So mulching and a layer of newspaper are the easy way to go.  If you want to plant somethign, just dig your hole through the mulch and paper/cardboard and you can easily plant your new plant!

Amazingly this works very well!