Can anyone ID this weed I have growing in the backyard?

Mmm. Appears that "barnyard grass" is a thing. CLICK. It does not say how to get rid of it other than "pulling it out". I have so much of this stuff I would have to quit my job to remove it by hand.

I just read a little bit about this stuff. There is a product called Martin's Eraser that "might" kill it but it's not a selective product which means it could harm the grass too. So that defeats the purpose. It contains something called Glyphosate. My Scott's product I used yesterday does not contain that ingredient. That same site I read also said that it can be pulled by hand but I have too much of this stuff and it also said pulling it is a waste of time because it will probably come back if it's already gone to seed. This stuff grows much faster than grass so you cut the lawn and the next day this stuff is already standing up over the top of the grass by an inch. Let the grass go for 4-5 days and this stuff is 6" higher than the grass. I swore I would drop some preemergent down this spring but I did not. Never again. Scotts with Halts every spring without fail going forward.  It will not survive the first frost so I guess I just have to live with it until the cold weather starts. 

I'll look for it. I like Scott's products but no matter what I'm going to do that. I told myself I was ABSOLUTELY doing that this spring and I don't know why I didn't do it. Bad me. Thanks for the link. I realize this is a first-world problem but it still peeves me.

Yeah, that sounds right.  One thing I read said that you should "brush" the glyphosate onto the leaves of the weeds.  My neighbors could probably hear me laugh about that one.  Seriously?  Here, let me sit down on the grass with my cup of glyphosate and my paint brush and carefully paint each leaf.  No.  It's annoying but it's not THAT annoying.  I'll cut it and I'll ignore it and I'll just deal with it until it's taken out by cold.  

I think I had a weird dream about this last night. It was like a 1950s black and white horror movie where the words twirl up on the screen like DANGEROUS DANDELIONS! BADASS BIRCHES! WORRISOME WEEDS! HOSTILE HOSTAS! There were long, drawn-out scenes of people putting their hands to their face screaming. Of course I wasn't in the movie because I'm not an actor. The most logical person to portray me was Brad Pitt. I think that much is universally accepted. The best part was the end... I brewed a beer with a super low pH and then drank a bunch of it and went outside to pee on all the barnyard grass. It curled up and died in minutes!

I've had the barnyard grass problem, too. About 10 years ago, the city tore up street and sidewalks and replaced all the overhead utilities with buried lines, removed all the old wooden telephone poles and streetlights, and installed new aluminum streetlight poles. It made the street look a lot better... but...

When they did this, they resodded the grass areas they had torn up, mostly the area between the sidewalk and the street, but also parts of the main lawn. The sod they used looked good at first, but was apparently full of barnyard grass seed. It took several years to eradicate this stuff. I used glyphosate (that's Round-Up, in case you didn't know! This was before the cancer lawsuits.) to kill most of it. Eventually our lawn got healthy enough to choke out the rest.

With a bit more homework I believe this stuff is actually called "signalgrass". The stuff in the lawn gets cut so it never gets tall but I have some growing around my pool equipment too and it's taller and has this sort of 'antenna-like' top on it.





It appears to be the exact same stuff. Luckily, Ortho Crabgrass Control says it kills signalgrass and also barnyard grass so I just went and got some of it and hit some inconspicuous spots along the fence bordering the Klopeks yard. We'll see how it looks in a couple days.

Here's my version. Looks the same.