Round up is not that toxic. It breaks down quickly. What do you intend to do with this area? That would determine what you should do there.

I believe the advice to use Round Up to keep grass from popping up in bare soil is incorrect. It's not a grass or weed preventer. Rather, it kills vegetation when it's ightly sprayed on the growing plant(s) and is absorbed by it.

I haven't used Round-Up myself, yet, opting for other methods of removal (for one, I would not have removed the sod, but I would have smothered it with the newspaper method and fed the soil), but, if I had an area such as yours that recently had all the sod removed, I might use a bottle. I would give the area a week or so, then go through it and target-spray any growth coming up. This way you minimize how much you are using.

As Starry said, Round-Up is supposed to break down into harmless by-products rather quickly. It is a very unstable mixture, much like Hydrogen Peroxide. Hydrogen Peroxide itself should never be ingested. It can be used for all sorts of medicinal purposes, even brushing your teeth, but it can make you sick if you swallow it. BUT, if you leave it in a glass for a week, maybe less, it breaks down rather quickly and loses the extra Hydrogen and becomes simple drinking water. So is Round-Up toxic? Yeah, to an extent. But it doesn't stay that way long enough to become a danger to the environment.

Thanks for all the advise. We will planting blackberries and shrubs in there.

If you are going to replant the area then you need to wait for any seeds to germinate before spraying a /grass/weed killer. I would put down newspaper or cardboard after planting to prevent weeds

I did pulled up all the sod in the front of the house and planted bushes, too. After I got the sod up, I simply rolled out brown builder's paper and covered that with about 6 inches of wood chips. The brown paper is heavy enough to keep any weeds from poking through before it starts breaking down. Cardboard would be better, but I had too large an area to collect enough and pull off all the tape to make it worthwhile. Now the problem is keeping the weeds from sprouting on top of the mulch. If you don't stay on top of it, you'll be using plenty of round-up to get rid of them. Wild spiderwort tried to take over after the rains stopped. I spent days pulling it, then put down more paper and wood chips.

Use Preen on the mulch and it will prevent weeds from germinating