Gardening and weeds

Join me, and let’s think together. Like really think about gardening, perhaps in a new way we’re not used to. I’ve been gardening for 25 years or so now, and I, like most others I imagine, believe that our fruits, herbs and vegetables ought to be the only thing growing in a garden, and other things that we think don’t belong are weeds, and a lot of labor goes into removing and preventing weeds. Techniques as simple as using ones hands to pull weeds and grasses, to using deep mulch, to smothering with things like cardboard and mulch, etc. are regularly used. But where does this idea come from? I’m not sure really. It seems to me that at some point in history gardeners decided that only the fruits, herbs, and vegetables that they lovingly tend are the only plants that belong in a garden, and all others are removed. But why? Is it for appearance? I get it, I like things to be neat and tidy. But if we look at nature for examples, many different plants of many different species grow happily right next to each other, sharing the minerals and water, and all survive and even thrive. There is beauty in the whole complexity.

So, what if we don’t remove weeds. Will food stuffs still grow in a garden? I think so. Might it appear chaotic? Maybe, depends on who is asked I suppose. Could it be more difficult to harvest? Likely yes I think. Will the “weeds” hog all the soil minerals? Doubtful, I think, as the mineral needs of growing plants are minuscule. Competition for sunlight? Ok, I get that, and wouldn’t want tropicals towering over my garden shading everything, but for the scope of this discussion, let’s stick with things that generally stay low to the ground, perhaps under 3 feet tall. Could they drink all the water? Well, I believe there’s too many variables at play here, from the soil types, it’s organic matter content and water holding capacity, the amount of rain or irrigation a garden gets, and whether or not it’s mulched to slow soil moisture loss through evaporation and prevent the soil from baking dry in direct sunlight. So, can we grow abundant gardens right alongside the undesired plants we’ve been removing for years? I think so.

These musings stem from my recent observation of my weedy garden. I should note this garden is a first year garden in some poor soil that I’m in the process of improving through biomass like wood chips and regular applications of compost teas for example. I have grasses thriving in my garden, the spreading kind like bermuda grass, some foxtail grass, some johnson grass, etc. There are other volunteers like nightshade, curly dock, locust tree seedlings, virginia buttonweed, among others. At first, I steadily removed grasses and volunteer sprouts that I didn’t plant. Then farm life got busy this summer and I watched the grasses and other forms of plant life get settled and comfortable in my garden. Now in September as the warm season is closing and the days get shorter, I had this thought: Why can’t I just let the grasses and other things grow alongside my veggies? Well, I can, but are there unforeseen impacts that have not just a negative affect on my vegetables and herbs, but a downright detrimental affect? Could the competition possibly have some unknown positive impact on my veggies, such as having a response to grow a little taller and bigger to outcompete the grasses and other growths? Could they establish some mutual, shared connection that is beneficial for each plant through roots in the soil via a network of mycorrhizal fungi? I grew some great watermelons and muskmelons, some fair tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. All my root crops did poorly, with the potatoes and onions even dying out, which I believe has more to do with the soil than neighboring plants. One thing I have learned in reading books on soil life is nature uses diversity in plant life to remediate soils, and not just for healing soils but the plant diversity is everywhere in healthy soils as well. The more different things growing means the more roots growing to different layers of the soil, which in turn also means more and different kinds of root exudates and sugars being delivered into the soil to feed, nurture and establish relationships with soil microbial life which then grow in population and in turn build healthier soil and grow healthier plants and trees.

I’m now thinking that the primary reason I was removing “weeds” is appearance. Most of us have all grown up seeing beautiful, orderly, weed free gardens in pictures, on tv, and now the internet. Our minds, I think, have been domesticated to think that this is the way it’s done. Most of us see it in real life regularly as well such as office buildings, gas stations and shopping centers for example, where they often have neat and tidy landscaping free of volunteer plants. The “weed freeness” culture appears to be everywhere. My wife and I keep our house neat and tidy, everything in its place, and I appreciate, understand, and in this case, need cleanliness and order. But when I observe nature, how it works, how it abhors a vacuum and where neat rows and monocultures don’t exist, it got me thinking. A weed free garden certainly may look nice, but is it necessary? Do any permies grow a “survival of the fittest” or chaos type garden?

James Freyr wrote:Do any permies grow a “survival of the fittest” or chaos type garden?

Well, I certainly have a "chaos type" garden! I've been focusing on building soil and have pretty much just tossed seeds out all over the place to see what made it. It's been so wet this year, nothing I've planted has really done well, but I've been surprised to see various pollinator-friendly types of plants come up both wild and from seed. I think my soil is so poor, still, and the weather here in North Georgia so weird, that I've lowered my expectations. But I'm getting biomass. My main weeding effort has been to pull up sweetgum and pine seedlings trying to restablish from the ones we had to cut down because of disease.

The one weedy type thing I have going for me is Potentilla indica, Indian strawberry: https://tinyurl.com/ovpnb84 I've been pulling up plugs of it with a step-on bulb planter and replanting them in the middle of pathways I've cleared, hoping it'll take over and knock back the poison ivy, Virginia creeper, and wild muscadines that try to encroach. A gardening friend warned me that I would be very sorry I'm doing this, because in our area this can be invasive; but better something I can use for tea and help feed the birds than poison ivy! https://tinyurl.com/ovpnb84

Anyway, I like your thought that the competition of weeds might actually help make for stronger plants overall. Would like to hear from those who have proven this to be true.

I've been growing food like this for the last two years and it is so freeing to me and saves so much time and energy! This year all of my food was grown like this, and I loved it.

It took me a while also to embrace the wild plants, and people close to me really disliked it at first, but after I discussed it with them and they've seen the results, they are starting to like the look of it also. Like you mentioned, I think we are just so conditioned to thinking that it has to be "tidy" to be beautiful and productive, it is a huge hurdle to get over.

Now when I see the wild plants coming up, I see so much beauty in the huge diversity of plants. I believe that this increase in flora has catalyzed a huge increase in the beneficial fauna on my property. Beneficial insects of all shapes and sizes are now constantly out and about helping to keep the pest populations in check. Japanese beetles used to love eating on my grapes and cherry leaves and other plants, and last year there were literally hundreds of them. The last one that I saw this year was in the clutches of a robber fly.

The plants seem to love the polyculture also. Sowing the edibles really thickly and having them close together can help them get a head start on other plants. My plants have grown so fast this year and looked more healthy this year than any other year before. If a wild plant is starting to get a little too big, it can be quickly cut back or even just pushed down which is my preference, so the edible plant can have a chance to catch up, and then they can still grow together. They seem to benefit from each other and help shade the soil to reduce evaporation, and the fungi seem to thrive below them, further increasing soil fertility and nutrient uptake!

I have so much more free time growing them in this way too, and I can enjoy it so much more!

I'm going to come in on the other side, I weeded pretty well up until June and then the strawberries kicked in and then the peas etc etc and the weeds got ahead of me, now we're talking about couch grass, creeping thistle, chickweed, creeping buttercup and Fat hen not trees or willow herb or anything really tall. there's plenty of other things in there to, field poppies, milk and sow thistles the occasional nettle, fumitary etc etc. Rows where I have half kept on top of weeding are ok, the crop survived (mostly) where I didn't get on top of it the crop is in some cases 100% lost.

Cabbages are half the size they should be in bad rows, onions were a total loss on the bed that didn't get weeded and a noticeable difference in size on the bed that got weeded half way down. Leeks were totally swallowed by weeds, and two rows of potatoes were badly stunted and producing 1/3 of the amount the more weeded rows produced. Slug pressure was much much higher in areas with weeds than clear areas, and areas that were not weeded last year have a lot more wire worm in than areas that were weeded (click beetles like to lay eggs on grass areas and a large % of the weeds are grass)

Things that don't seem to care are courgette plants (winter squashes are not managing the competition) peas, beans and popcorn. tomatoes themselves do not seem to care but they all get blight because of the reduced airflow and increased dampness, my outdoor tomatoes were scattered all over the place one in the peas, one in the onions a couple in the lettuces, they all get blight and slugs! (indoor ones are still going fine)

Couch grass ruins onions, potatoes and other root crops by growing THROUGH them, it's incredibly annoying to dig up a lovely potato and find a strand of couchgrass right through it making it useless for anything but eating now after cutting half of it off.

I have huge issues with certain pests, noticeably voles, watervoles and slugs. All of these are much worse around the edges of the garden next to the 100% wild areas, losses on the strawberry row closest to the wild flower grass and scrub approaches 80% two rows further in it's 5% These areas have been wild for over 30 years they are as nature intended for our area with a huge mix of plants, we have lizards, hedgehogs, ground beetles and toads in abundance, masses of birds (who try to eat every single berry before you get a chance to even sneeze at them) and the pests are also quite happy. The main issue this year was the winter, or rather the lack of it, we only got below freezing for 1 week so weeds and pests continued to grow and breed all the time.

I would guess that weeds cost me around 20% of the crop this year, some crops were not or hardly affected and some were a total loss.  If I didn't weed at all it would be closer to 100% loss. In my climate weeds start growing around early May (last frost 1st June) and stop in November (first frost 1st October) as we have cool wet summers they never stop growing or germinating.

I focus on getting rid of certain weeds--the perennial grasses have got to go, and if I find bindweed or goatshead it's GONE. No quarter.

Other than that they can pretty much do their own thing.

I keep my own seeds, and those that survive more than a year or two tend to handle the "wild" aspect much more easily. I let the onions reseed, leave potatoes in the ground and let them do their own thing as well. Rather than "weeding" in a traditional sense, I have tried to seed the garden areas with other plants that fill the same niche--grains instead of wild grasses, lettuces and other greens, that kind of thing.

Of course, I fight a running battle with those in the household who feel that a "weedy" garden is anathema and regularly pull up my seed plants...

I weed. For the same reasons Skandi mentioned.  If I allow the wild plants to overcome my vegetable beds I get less produce, smaller produce or no produce.

I have a garden that has been organized chaos since last winter. Once the veggies (mostly beans) were growing I let the weeds (mostly Spanish needle) grow too. I cut back the weeds to veggie leaf height every few weeks to keep them from shading to much. They shade the soil wonderfully and keep it moist without watering. It looks like a complete overgrown mess to outsiders but I view it as a very low maintenance garden with a vigorous culling program. The primary objective is to get it to go wild without much work and produce good seeds, both of which it does well for suitable crops. In this case: beans, peas, maypop, amaranth and wild greens. Note: limited sunlight and few soil amendments. Hugelculture.

Great topic James Freyr,. I wonder the same thing, could it be beneficial to let weeds grow?..
I like to keep the beds in my garden weed free too, ideally i'd like to grow the beds very full of production plants and then eat/remove the smaller ones while saving the bigger ones to harvest seeds from them.
I have a production garden for mostly annuals which is quite recent, some beds are two years old, some three. They consist of aged cow manure that was just sitting in a field. Heavy seed load of lambs quarters and some nightshade berry carrying plant. During the third year of extreme drought while my annual crops and i gave up, i decided to let the weeds grow, with the idea to just cull the weeds before they get a chance to seed. Mulch them..
They're so strong! No watering needed, blazing sun. They must have some great mychorrhizal fungi connection on the go that brings water from deeper layers up, in exchange for sugars. And like mentioned above, they shade the soil.
I've been promoting the growth of white dutch Clover for some time now. As they have been known to fix nitrogen and they cover the mulched paths in between the beds, keeping the mulch moist, speeding up soil building. They have covered some of the beds, because i have let them do that over summer. Now i have taken it out, replanting it elsewhere. So the beds have functioned a s a white clover nursery.
Now that the rains have returned i have freed my beds of weeds again, and have seeded for winter crops. Ground cover like miners lettuce and lamb's lettuce.
Skandi Rogers and Steve Thorn have opposing experiences, if i may be so free to categorize the two, as far as i know, Skandi has more of a production garden while Steve leans more towards fruit/forest gardening. That might explain something.Correct me if i'm wrong!
Something else i observed in my production was that yarrow which i have been fighting quite some time now has a very good influence on the trees i have planted last fall. Out of twelve trees, 4 had yarrow growing around the stem, they thrived! All the others had reduced growth and leaves where brownish. I have taken yarrow seeds and am spreading it around all the young trees now.

The need for weeding appears to vary greatly  as to what it is I am trying to grow. To shorten the list, onions, carrots, and asparagus benefit from weeding . Potatoes, tomatoes, and okra show no improvement.

Check the work of Michael "Skeeter" Pilarski. Skeeter does "closed canopy gardening". As an outsider, I can't see any sort of paths in his gardens- but he can. He can also identify everything that grows in his gardens-. And some few things he will take out, but mostly it's about all the photosynthesis possible.
Gardening without weeding absolutely works - but don't expect it to work with all your standard selections of annual vegetables, they won't all make it.
People talk about weeds competing for resources, but I believe it can be proven that sunlight is really the only resource plants compete for. Some plants are allelopathic and that's a potential problem.
Recognize the weeds that are vegetables and take advantage of them ;)

James,

I love this thread!

So I am a lazy gardener.  I like to get my raised garden beds nicely set up, full of freshly decomposed wood chips, plant my crops and sit back and wait.  I try to include some compostable weed barrier such as newspaper or cardboard to suppress most of the weeds, but some always get through.  I really don't do much weeding.  Really I just sit back and wait for the plants to grow.

This does not affect my harvests in a meaningful way.  The garden still grows, the potatoes and tomatoes still get harvested.  Sure, weeds also grow and it does get a bit untidy, but what of it?  The weeds I have just don't affect my plant growth so I don't care that much about them.  Besides, I can usually utilize the weeds as some form of compost.

Great concept James, and a great thread.

Eric

My garden tends to be very, very weedy. My potatoes didn't seem to care. The tomatoes were stunted, and more died out or never flowered than would have if there hadn't been weeds. My squash and melons are only about 1/20th as productive as they could be.

I think if I could keep the weeds shorter than 6 inches, they wouldn't be a problem. The trouble is really the fact that they're shading out everything. Parts of the garden where I was able to keep the weeds down for the first month, are doing much better than the rest, because the vegetables were able to get a head start.

I'm hoping to find a short, creeping, tenacious plant that I could use to keep the taller weeds out. Bonus if it has some use other than as a cover crop.

Ellendra Nauriel wrote:My garden tends to be very, very weedy. My potatoes didn't seem to care. The tomatoes were stunted, and more died out or never flowered than would have if there hadn't been weeds. My squash and melons are only about 1/20th as productive as they could be.

I think if I could keep the weeds shorter than 6 inches, they wouldn't be a problem. The trouble is really the fact that they're shading out everything. Parts of the garden where I was able to keep the weeds down for the first month, are doing much better than the rest, because the vegetables were able to get a head start.

I'm hoping to find a short, creeping, tenacious plant that I could use to keep the taller weeds out. Bonus if it has some use other than as a cover crop.

I use sweet potatoes.

Well like a lot of things it depends. On a lot of things, most important I think is what kind of weeds are we talking about? Johnson grass, thistles or burdock are not allowed in my garden although I allow them on the property and harvest (when not in seed) for mulch. Most grasses especially large perennials types are not allowed. Grass as a rule I think is about the worst weed there can be in the garden.

My favorite weeds are probably purslane  and creeping charlie, both low growing ground covers that are easy to control and the purslane has other uses too. In my garden Creeping Charlie sometimes completely covers some areas in the winter and I just rake it off the next spring and plant. It doesn't grow as vigorously in warm weather and the veggies easily out compete it.   Some other favored (weeds) or at least they act like them are dill, marigolds, walking onions, garlic, sunflowers, poppies, asters, wild beans, radishes, turnips, mustard and current tomatoes.

Vegetables are grown generally in rows in beds but lots of things are just mixed together. Right now for example late planted pole beans are growing on spent corn stalks and recently planted peas are starting to climb the now declining tomato plants.

I do have paths, that I keep mostly clear but at a glance they're not apparent.  I garden no-till and (assisted) survival of the fittest but I have a second garden that is pretty much totally survival of the fittest.

There, in that back garden I do minimal prep, plant and step back. One of my now favorite tomatoes, several beans and some other things originated from the few seeds that were produced back there. This spring I pulled and raked off the creeping charlie, scratched up a spot with the hoe and broadcast planted corn. Plants got not even three feet tall and I didn't realize they were even there in the weed patch till I saw the tassels. Now I'm shocked to see about a dozen little ears of corn maturing. Not much considering I sowed probably a 1000 seeds but I'm happy. I've also harvested some very small but very tasty watermelons, they had actually escaped the weeds somewhat by climbing the back fence in to the trees, a vine has to do what a vine has to do I reckon.  

Over the winter I decided that I can't do it. A weedy, somewhat chaotic, lazy type garden isn't in my heart and doesn't make me happy. I need structure and order in my life, including my garden, it's just the way I'm made. I spent an hour or two, once or twice, sometimes three times a week and sometimes skipping a week or two, from December until now pulling Bermuda grass and a few other weedy dormant things. I still have a little ways to go, but I've got about 80% of the garden cleaned up. This morning I noticed a hundred thousand or so tiny little sprouts from whatever kind of wind-blown seeds and other things that grew in the garden and set seed last year, so it was easy to lightly rake the wood chips uplifting and turning over most of those sprouts. I'll likely have to do it again several more times this April and into May, but it hardly took 45 minutes. I figure it's stop whatever I'm doing and rake the sprouting weeds now while they're teeny tiny, or do other things and then pull all the weeds by hand next month when they're more rooted and won't lift out with light raking. Seeing the garden now has me super excited about this season ahead and I'm itching to get my already started plants in and direct sow some warm weather seeds!

James, I am having a terrible time with the weeds (and ants!)

Maybe since the weeds are edible or medicinal, it would be good to try eating them or using them.

Bull thistle, sow thistle, sticky willy (cleaver), and plantain.  I don't mind the plantain. And then there is the burr clover that I gave up trying to stop it from taking over.

I am trying hard to keep them from going to seed as that is about all I can do.

Some with sticky seeds I have not identified, yet.

Do you think the weeds are trying to send me a message?

James Freyr wrote:Do any permies grow a “survival of the fittest” or chaos type garden?  

I can't do it anymore. I have found in my life that the best way to learn something is from direct experience. I am going back to structure and order and today was my first garden planting day of the spring season, complete with tape measure and twine for straight rows and everything evenly spaced. The "first year garden" that I noted in my original post is now beginning its third season. All those wood chips I had decayed into black fluffy deliciousness, and I chose to drag out the rototiller last month, air up the tires which had long gone flat, and I turned all my decayed wood chips and old compost piles into the native soil. After tilling, which I believe I may never have to do again, I covered the garden in oak chips again, some from a pile that had been sitting for a year which I ran out of and also some fresh oak chips I had delivered a couple weeks ago. One interesting discovery I made is how the tiller did an excellent job pulling bermuda grass runners out from the shallow depths of the soil. I had to stop numerous times and unclog the tiller tines which were wrapped up in bermuda grass. It also left many laying on the surface which were easy to pick up and cast aside. And now that spring has sprung and the days are warming, when I see little bermuda grasses poking through the wood chips, they lift right out rather easily from the loose soil.

Like others posting, it's a matter of time and mood on how a garden bed looks. I currently have way more garden beds made than I even use, so naturally weeds come in. I like most of them except again, like others have said - I pull grass tenaciously!

Chop/drop with the weed wacker before too many go to seed/living mulch is kind of my philosophy...I've found pleasure in learning more about the uses and life cycles of the "weeds" since they seem to be an inevitable companion in the world of permaculture gardening.

I prefer to cover and layer if I get enough supply of woodchips, compost, leaves, hay, straw, even brown cardboard.

Good luck weedy gardeners and stay healthy!! ...I think spring can bite us with ambition as my hernia, my lower back, and elbows are already singing :)

Count me in the pro-weeding camp. But there are nuances. It depends on the climate, the soil, the crop and the weeds. It's easier to pull unwanted weeds from sandy than clay soil, so it's easier to tolerate them. Some weeds, like the ones that colonize any bed that isn't covered with hay or a thick cover crop over winter--chickweed, purple dead nettle and cress--are easy to pull and likely work as a cover crop; they also provide bulk to my compost piles. Others--grasses and clovers--are a bitch to get rid of, as is horse nettle which seems to come in on every load of manure I get--that one has thorns, is perennial so it comes back, and is in the same family as tomatoes so it may overwinter diseases. The grasses and clover come in on my mulch hay, a quandary as mulch is simply a necessity for both weed suppression and keeping the ground moist and cool, and hay is mostly what's available..although this year I'm trying some three-year-old wood chips in my strawberries (which I had to eliminate last year because they were so infested with clover) and flowerbed. I thought the woodchips might suck nitrogen from the soil, but there is no sign of that--the only problem is weeds are beginning to come through, I need more woodchips. It seems every year a new weed introduces itself--three years ago it was galinsoga and I didn't know what a prolific troublemaker it was, let it seed all over, so the last two years I've been eradicating it quickly and it's getting under control. Two years ago it was perilla, which I now have under control but will allow a few to survive and one to seed, because I love the smell it exudes. People talk about the virtue of weeds supporting pollinators and predator bugs--yes but I let the weeds OUTSIDE my garden take care of that, along with the volunteers I let stay for their ornamental properties--butterfly weed, mullein, yarrow, and I have two tansy patches. I prefer the orderly look, but the reason I spend so much time weeding is to get a crop--nearly all my plants are annuals not ready to compete with aggressive weeds. There is never a time when there are NO weeds, but this year I've come closer because it's been dry all spring (so the time I don't spend weeding, I spend watering).

The garden I've maintained in FL is very small, I used to weed voraciously and top with mulch.

I had many pest problems for quite a while. I started reading "The One Straw Revolution" again and decided after all the work I put in, to neglect it. Some weeds have taken over but everything I transplanted, or volunteered, is thriving like I've never seen.

Yes, I may have to remove some weeds that leave hitchhikers all over my legs, but other than that, I think they are part of a healthy, local ecosystem, which is what I strive for, rather than a fragmented and isolated garden.

I guess "after working, no working" is my new philosophy. Seems to be working!

I have a lot of ground to maintain so I chop and drop weeds with my pruners, a hand sickle, or pulling so I'm not hauling back and forth. The plants fertilize and mulch the ground. Plant matter does need to be pulled a foot back from seeding areas or the tiny critters hiding in there will eat the seeds or seedlings. I don't bother with the spring weeds or flat weeds since they don't get too tall or they die away. I pull weeds that are in the place of where I want to plant and then chop and drop any weeds that get too tall and crowd my crop. It works pretty well if I can stay on top of it. I've seen a pasture garden that had no water available in KC, Kansas that left the weeds and learned how to plant in rows in it. The weeds help hold humidity, shade from the sun and hid the crop from pests. They did have a shaded tunnel for fussy crops.

Definately chop and drop for me.  If I can get the roots out of a plant I don't want growing in an area I will just leave them exposed with the chop and drops.

I am starting another garden area that will take a couple of years to establish.  The semi-scatter method is what I decided to do this year.  Some smaller area's (10-20 SQ FT) I laid some sticks around and planted seeds there.  Some were corn, not sweet corn, but feed corn for my chickens.  If it grows to maturity, next year there will be a lot more planted.

I planted a variety of sunflowers and apparently they were to many to close as I had to thin them out yesterday.  Also did a scatter of black oil sunflower seeds over a larger area.
I BELIEVE the plants coming up are those, but won't know for a bit as they are only a foot tall right now.  If so I won't have to buy any for the birds this coming winter.  There are a LOT of plants coming up.  If not the sunflowers, well, chop and drop.  It will build the soil.

Semi-scatter of pumpkin, acorn and zucchini's coming up also.  I am going to thin my raspberry plants this fall and want to create a living fence with them.  I will take afew years for that get established but watching things come together over time is rewarding.   That whole "I want it now!" thing doesn't work well for me, except when I might go to the pub and want a col one.  lol.

I found that hiding my squash and beans amidst the taller weeds kept them from drying out and it hid them from the pesky deer.  There is not a fence that mt. NC deer cannot jump.  Marvelous athletes with marvelous appetites.  I am going to expand my weedy bank this year with other things and see what happens.

I really love this post ! As I read the introductory paragraphs I realized that all the reasons normally cited to get rid of weeds have to do with a very immediate self gratifying type of motivation. Is this what I want to eat? Will this look nice to me / neighbors etc.
I love the reflection in this post that caused me to look beyond the “shoulds” based on my goals alone, to perhaps a greater purpose … ecodesign. My ancestors believed that we are not the center but rather part of the whole … wondrous glimmering, growth around us.

I like to choose my weeds.  And have weeds I can eat when ever possible.  Lettuce, for example, germinates very early, and if allowed to will create a closed canopy before much else gets a chance to germinate.  It’s a generous reseeder too .  And it’s food.  
Purslane has culinary and weed varieties.  I eat them both, and allow them to shade and cover the soil.
Nigella is shallow rooted and easy to pull up to get out of the way when I want the space for something else.  It’s decorative as a fresh ordried bouquet.

There are plenty of plants that I use as weeds.

Some of the weeds I like to prevent are goat head, even though they have medicinal value, and what people in my region call foxtail, which has a seed that travels one way, up the dogs nose or ear or between the toes into the flesh.  A foxtail is an automatic $100  trip to the vet.

I want live roots in the soil, to feed the billions of gardening partners who live there.  I believe exposing the bare earth to sunlight is detrimental to those same microorganisms. I use white clover as a perennial weed and green mulch and ground cover.  It spreads annd is easy to pull and hosts nitrogen fixing bacteria.  

And, luckily for me, I like the look of the mixed textures and colors, and continuous transformation.  

I've only got 2 plants on the "pull on sight unless nothing else is growing nearby list";  English Ivy and Himalayan blackberry.  Except in the hedges, about half of my deer barriers on a hectare are blackberry hedge.   I also pull a lot of trailing blackberry.   Tripwire blackberry, when the vines are vigorous and mature.

The other plant I often pull is nipplewort.  For the original red clay "soil", that one and quackgrass seem to like it most of all.   Except I learned that ya don't pull quack grass, because that hardly works unless you are going to dig up and turn over sod to bake and die in summer sun.  A no-till and no-weeding treatment is to bury it once or thrice with fertile material.  As soon as the area will supporting dense 4' + tall annual growth, the quackgrass mostly disappears, remaining a minor component of the cool season ground cover.

For whatever reason, the perennial grasses are not very aggressive here.  I especially like grasses that seem to germinate rarely and happily grow as a tight poof ball bunch that can get 6' tall before it starts to fall over.  I know there are 3 of those species here and that they do not spread by rhizome like that darned quack grass, but I do not know their names.

Kinda funny how I aim for the ratio;  ~61% coverage with insect ecology, no-management-but-seed-flicking weed herbs and whatnot (usually with as much nitrogen fixer as I can encourage by stepping on things) and the rest of the area is plants I wanna eat a big bowl of.   By definition, the garden is 60% "weeds": plants that do not need my intervention apart from flicking seeds once to live here, and grow vigorously.    Not "yard" gardening, that's for sure.

I do a bit of yard garden, a few mostly amended rich soil beds where I mostly mat down annuals and mostly pull perennials as the tomatoes and squash spread into summer and dominate the area come mid July.

I'm a fan of the concept that there exists conditions where all you need to do is control which plants get sunlight.  Just a bit of walking and matting down the competition, the gentle way (if you aren't felling a tree.)

It seems to work well with happy potato plants and most the annual herbaceous volunteers here, but the woody bits will spring right back, and it seems that the perennial mycorrhiza cannot be so easily convinced to switch which plant they are assisting.  They are in it for the long haul, and your plant's long term prospects do not look good...  

I really enjoy finding naturally occurring lines and strokes of a plant species in what looks like a thicket come unmanaged summer solstice.   Reminds me of the sculptors who said something along the lines of "I didn't make it, I just revealed it."  I don't garden, I'm a fan of sculpture.  haha

Also potatoes.  I love finding potatoes. "How far away did this one run from the nearest planting last year?  let's see here....1 pace, 2 pace, 3, 4!  4 paces!!!

I strongly suspect that when an annual plant self assembles into 100+ ft^2 monocultures in an area with 100+ species of plant going to seed nearby, it is the scheme of the fungus.  

The mycorrhizal fungus in that spot thought "this is the plant that will get me the most goods, so perhaps this other fungus and I will eat all the other seeds except the chosen species..."

Probably through mycorrhizal fungus, we get the weeds nothing else will compete with.  The plants we wish would grow there just can't manage the same photosynthetic efficiency in the given conditions, so the fungus gets a feel for the roots you're hoping will spread and thinks something like, "ummmm, no thanks, I'm in it for the long haul and I'm sticking with my horse."

I began to suspect this when I noticed that nipplewort came out with more snow white material attached to it's roots than any other species I pulled, and it has a tendency to form mono culture patches like no other plant here.  From oh so many tiny little seeds per plant, making oh so many tiny little plants, some of which get to be 5' tall be it mostly stalk.  Thusly, nipplewort also helped me learn that if it's an annual and it grows YUUUUUUge, definitely let it grow.  That's a rule, for fertility and time management (if 1 annual plant gets to be 7 ft tall and is the only plant in it's m^2 of 100% shade, managing that area is much faster than say, quackgrass.  

Thimbleberry is a perennial that arrived last year, and apparently it has a fungus friend that also doesn't play nice.  Thimbleberry made the biggest lushest mint patch disappear, in 1 year.  Mint is another one that seems to allow very little seed germination in it's territory here, but apparently it will give it up for thimbleberry  (or the mint was more actively wiped out, perhaps by its former friend of a fungus switching horses.)

I have seen red kuri squash planted in a ~3 yard sized pile of woodchips and manure grow so rapidly, no other plants could compete.  One seed called it a year after making 4 vines that each went 12 to 18' in different directions, up and over things.  Thus I learned, trying to grab a squash that is hanging in the middle of a blackberry thicket can be kinda difficult, and when conditions are optimum for your desired plant, you don't really have to weed (because your plant is growing like a weed XD)  

In my opinion there's a difference between 'a wild garden' and 'a weedy garden'. A 'wild garden' is designed to be that, the wild (native) plants in that garden are chosen to be there and planted at the right places. In a weedy garden 'volunteer' wild plants grow where they were not planted. Often those are 'pioneer plants', growing where annual vegetables were sown.

Annual vegetables are sensitive plants. They want a certain amount of sunlight, water, nutrients, etc. When a 'pioneer plant' like a dandelion comes up in the row of carrots, f.e., that isn't what the small carrot plants like ... If you aim to have a good yield of carrots, you'll need to weed away that dandelion.
This is one of the reasons why I prefer perennial edibles. They aren't that fussy. Most of them can grow happily alongside dandelions and poppies. That's how I like my garden to look, a mixture of edibles and nice wild flowers.
(this reminds me I need to take photos ...)

I live in the southwest Prairie of Saskatchewan and growing a garden can be brutal here. We often have no real spring, with the weather switching from cold winter to the  hot belting sun of summer in a matter of days.
Sowing seeds and even transplants is difficult because the ground is too cold to begin with and then the hot sun sears the struggling seedlings when the ground warms up enough to plant. Prevalent 'weeds' here are lambs quarters and kosha. Crab grass is another and, like others I remove it wherever I find it in my garden.
I  have learned to value the shade provided by most of the weeds when they grow faster than my vegetable seeds. My carrots,  in particular, will  only sprout within the shade of the lambs quarters.  Then, once my seedlings are up and well established, I pull the weeds at 6 -8 inches high. They are small rooted at this stage and easy to take out without disturbing the new veggies, but if I leave the weeds to grow beyond this stage, they will choke out what ive planted. One good weeding is usually all that is required... after that, in an ironic reversal, the veggies will generally shade out the weeds.
Having said that, I do appreciate the permaculture concept of no rows and interplanting a variety of species. I mimic this to a degree by mixing all my compatible seeds together; carrots, onions, lettuce, kale, etc., mixing them all together, and broadcast seeding my beds. I  then plant beans and tomatoes, etc a intervals through the same bed. I've noticed the seedlings continue to do best under the shade of these plants until everything catches up and grows on together.
There are pros and cons to everything, of course,  but the only 'con' I've noticed,  is that I can't always identify my veggies until they get bigger. Nothing goes to waste around here, either... the weeds I pull are used as protective mulch in my paths, around my berry bushes and anywhere else I want to protect the ground from our hot sun.

Wendy, do you count the lambs quarters as spring vegetables?  They’re quite nutritious.

Do you ever let your lettuce go to seed?  When you have LOTS of seeds, you can get pretty generous with them.  Since lettuce germinates in cold soil, and under the snow, I wonder if you could have lettuce with next year’s lambs quarters.  If I wanted to give it a try, In the late fall I would mulch the garden bed with something coarse grained, wood chips or used straw, a thin layer.  Then I would scatter lettuce seeds, then wait and see. Spinach might also do well.

Just guessing, because I have never experienced your climate, but where I used to live, some years we had instant summer, and this was the way I could get early spring crops.

I define "weed" as any plant I don't want in my garden.
That being said, my garden often looks like a jungle with leaves, roots, and fruit plants growing right next to each other. I often let the "volunteers" grow to full maturity as well. I just transplanted four volunteer squash plants of unknown variety, into the recently vacated garlic bed.
With so many plants I actually want in my garden, I have no tolerance for things I don't want.

Thekla, I collect seeds from almost everything. Lettuce is exceptionally good at producing copious quantities of seeds. I just have to get to them before the wildlife does....... :-)

Saw a TikTok that suggested mugwort helps astral projection. Who the heck knows if that's true or not, but it is not far fetched to suggest there might be beneficial properties in plants called weeds that goes mostly unknown.

Nope. I put in the work, and am rewarded with food.  Besides Organic, and Heirloom/Open Pollinated, one thing I look for when ordering seeds is “HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE”. That’s why I have what family, friends, and neighbors think is a ridiculously large garden (even though I seem to enlarge it every year) ~ I like growing and preserving as much of my family’s food as I can. Not weeds.


I want to feed my household from spring to hard frost out of the garden, and out of the freezer and pantry the rest of the year.

So I pull weeds. I lay them right where they died to serve as a warning to their weedy friends.
Unless it’s purslane, or dandelion, which we like eating in salad or cooked with other greens, I don’t want it in my food beds.
Besides, as long as I mulch to keep the soil covered, and stay on top of the weeds, it’s easy to maintain. A lot easier than trying to salvage something edible out of a weed bed.

A side benefit ~ keeping the junk out allows me to let certain favorite herbs, cilantro, dill, fennel, etc re-seed themselves year after year. That doesn’t happen if I have matts of grass or smartweed choking them out. And who wants grass or clover stems mixed in when you lop off a fistfull of cilantro for Taco Tuesday?