By the mid-June, most residents of the desert are ready for October and dropping temperatures.  Grass near sidewalks withers from the heat and electric bills soar into the stratosphere as people huddle inside.

Then the monsoons arrive.  Humidity transforms air into a smothering blanket.  Fluffy white clouds wander across formerly empty blue skies.  They multiply and grow into thunderheads looming higher than Mount Everest.  They bring rain.  Some days there are only spatters, great drops of mud.  Other days, the heavens open and pour down floods of rain.  Dry rivers fill and drivers accustomed to dry asphalt, fishtail into each other.

And weeds grow from zero to sixty (inches) in under five days.   I sigh and pull out the weed sprayer.  I spray and spray and spray, because after ten years of neglect, we have that many weeds.  But I also learn.  Some weeds curl up and die politely.  Others claw their way into the earth and give me the leaf.  (Those I hit again.)  I'm not an advocate of monoculture, but jimson weed, goatheads and nightshade relatives are not welcome on my property.

You'd think  it would be simple to deal with rampant vegetation, but it's not.  Home Depot, Lowes, etc offer a wide assortment of weed sprays and sprayers.  What you should buy depends on your requirements.  Do you have a small area?  Do you want everything dead?  Permanently dead?  Do you want to kill just grass or just weeds?

Most sprays come in two forms - concentrate and ready-to-use.  If you need  to spray a small area, the ready-to-use may work for you.  However, if you have a city lot or more and room to store a hand sprayer, concentrate is usually much less expensive.  Note - don't buy the cheapest sprayer.  I find the Round-up one gallon sprayer offers a better combination of price versus performance. 

In the area of sprays, I tend to use Roundup or Ortho's Weed-b-Gone.  We don't need to sterilize the soil for a year, so I'm not up on what works well in that area.  (Roundup does offer a product, however.)   Grass-b-Gone is handy when  Bermuda tries to invade a flower bed, but I've only seen it in ready-to-use quarts.  

If you're mixing spray from concentrate, don't over-dilute the mixture.  My preference is to add up to fifty percent extra to make sure the weeds die.  Also, if the weeds aren't obviously dying after a couple of days, I spray them again.  If that doesn't work, I use another spray because  Roundup resistant weeds have been developing.  (The formulas for Weed-b-Gone and Roundup seem to be different.)  If the third time isn't the charm, I get out my hoe.  Those weeds are NOT going to multiply. 

Expect this to be a never-ending process.  Birds and the wind transport weed seeds.  You can't win, but you can keep them beat back.   When that happens, you'll finally be able to kick back on the patio, drink a lemonade and enjoy the view.