Beginner Gardening: How to prepare large overgrown area for planting?, 1 by Lauratron

Lauratron wrote:
Hello!

The full length of my back yard (about 70 feet long by 16 feet deep) is overrun with wild violets and other unwanted plants/weeds. Though it's usually quite pretty and requires zero work, they've started to migrate into the yard, regardless of the 2 ft. border I added to separate the two areas. I've come to the conclusion that I want to take on the task of converting the area into a shade/hosta garden (I know, it's a large area!)

My big question mark though is how I should kill everything in there to start with my blank canvas? It's about 90% wild violets. I'm worried about using a weed killer as I don't want to make the soil unusable this year. Once I get everything taken out, I plan to lay landscape plastic and mulch. It will probably take me a few years to plant all the plants I want, but at least it will be tailored until I complete it. Any ideas or thoughts?

I've attached a picture from two years ago (background in the image). This is before we went through and manually pulled out all the overgrowth of some tall plant/weed that you see. Without that stuff it's much nicer looking with just the violets. I tried planting hostas in with the wild violets but they're too aggressive and choke everything out.