Lots of work in the garden in spring! I would use your idea of preventing seeds from germinating this rainy season! We have a nice tree which produced so many fruits last year. I didn’t realise that those fruit could germinate very fast. So we had to dig all the small plants with roots! Very tiring.
The fruits were edible but they didn’t taste very nice so the squirrels also ignored them.
So glad you had several people helping with all the hard work. My next project is to repair the roof on the east side, some birds made a nest inside last year.