No till bed with ragweed?

I learned the other day that there are THREE kind of ragweed in this area, the two I knew, and the one that has taken over the back yard... I thought it was going to be a daisy, the butterflies like it, so I left it, doesn't look like the other types. It is just starting to throw pollen, hasn't seeded yet, and was 5 foot tall when I went out this morning and slaughtered it.

I needed to not have an allergic reaction to it, so I turned on a sprinkler and worked in the water flow, softened the ground so I could pull it, and kept the pollen moving down and out of my face. Seems to have worked well for the allergies.

Pulling it in the muddy soil was taking huge clumps of mud up, the stalks were heavy with water and mud, as well as being large. I was pulling other problem plants as I worked, out of habit, Prostrate Knotweed and crabgrass, mostly. I realized that put me at close to clear-cutting the area, and more than halfway to a no till bed. So I started stacking the pulled plants to be a bottom layer, and I have a lot of hay I can put on it, and cardboard to cover it with so it all rots down well.

My question is am I making a terrible mistake? The ragweed is not seeding yet, nor the knotweed, the crabgrass I'm not going to be able to remove enough roots to stop it. Will the ragweed come back happier, healthier and stronger? Am I enabling it or slaughtering it? I'm aiming for slaughter...

Is it a good or bad idea to use the ragweed as my base layer in a new bed?

And I moved a bunch of big black and yellow garden spiders to new areas, 20-25 of them are now in the zinnias or beans. And one preying mantis, I don't know if he jumped or was flying, but he landed on my face, freaked me out, then got put on the tomatoes.

Yay spider rescue!

Someone suggested the ragweed get composted. I do not have a hot compost pile going, or space and stuff to make one. All I have is a yard waste stack that is breaking down slowly, when it's not resprouting or filling up with poison ivy. If I do anything with the ragweed, that's where it would end up, as I have no other place. And as it's heavy and the roots are full of dirt, I'd rather not move it if I don't have to.

Anyone ever put down ragweed, and some other stuff, then cover heavily with hay, and leaves when they come down, and have data one way or the other on if it resprouts a ton of ragweed?

Although.... If it does resprout, the soil would at least be looser due to the rot and worms and such, and it would remove easier.

Cool that your relocated your spiders!

As far as rag weed or any other weed I don't worry too much about any of them. I have, or had a nice patch of what I call horse weeds but a friend of mine says is giant rag weed. It's an annual and by overharvesting before it went to seed I killed it out.

I used it as well as burdock, thistles, Johnson grass and about anything else that easily makes lots of biomass as mulch. Generally I've always been careful to harvest it just before it has viable seeds.

In the years since I switched exclusively to no-till I'm finding that weeds of any kind are often more an ally than foe. Even nasty grasses and the like that spread by rhizomes not only succumb fairly quickly to being buried in mulch but that when they do resurface their durable rhizomes become their Achilles heal.  They can't hold on to the looser organic rich soil and easily rip out in their entirety.

Any way that's my experience. The more you mulch and build your no-till bed the easier it gets. All weeds, if they do show up just pluck out easily and get dropped on top. I often even let them grow so their dead bodies have more mass to add to the top around my vegetables.

It sounds like a lot of hard work to maintain no-till beds by hand but it's not. I just came in from cleaning a blackberry bed. It is three feet wide and about fifty feet long and has been neglected all season. It was filled with knee high grasses of various types  as well as other weeds. It took me approximately 20 minutes while listening to the birds to completely pull all those weeds by hand and pile them around the berry canes. I likely won't do any more in that bed until about this time next year, well other than pick blackberries.

I love ragweed for my no till gardens. That’s a serious amount of biomass for free! I do the same with Johnson grass. I even made a special tool just for the occasion. A four foot long 2X4 with a piece of angle iron screwed in. One side of the angle iron is facing down as a cutting edge. One hole on each end to fasten a rope handle to. I got the inspiration from from those old crop circle videos where they tried to convince us aliens didn’t do it.  👽
I would picture but the board broke last year.