I always say, if I weed the garden with brute force, by hoeing, hand-weeding, or spraying, then I’m just recreating the situation of disturbance that created the weed habitat in the first place!
But if I weed the garden with my MIND, then I’ll never have to weed it again!
BTW, I’m posting this because it is very much the same kind of thought strategy we apply to our finances in our book Growing FREE
which you can win a copy of here at Permies this week!
The key is to understand how I’m creating the weed problem in the first place, and just stop creating the problem!
The first tool we can use is what the Transformative Adventures Coop community calls “The First Rule of Guilds,” it’s the first thing I think of when creating a garden.
If I just till a garden in the middle of a Bermuda grass lawn, I have designed a Bermuda grass problem right into the garden. I’ve designed the garden to fail. Here’s a 3-minute video using the First Rule to fight weeds.
First Rule Video
So following the first rule, I can start by planning Type 2 areas that can thrive WITH whatever the resident weeds are. There are tons of plants that can thrive with grasses, for example. I use edible meadow guilds in all but the smallest gardens. Many of our favorite plants evolved to succeed into grasslands! That includes asparagus, Turkish rocket, many herbs, mints, garlic, onions, most bulbs, many native plants, and of course, most cane fruits, shrubs and trees.
A video on establishing edible meadow guilds, with plant lists.
video
I can also use “slashmulch,” which academics often call the world’s most sustainable form of agriculture, in edible grasslands. This is basically our famous Permaculture “chop and drop” applied to a field prep scale, where mulch is grown in place by slashing the resident vegetation and then planting into the mulch. This is how many believe Native Americans grew 3 sisters in some regions, and it’s how I grow my 3 sisters gardens without tilling, right into the lawn.
Slashmulch techniques can be used to grow corn, beans, squash, sunchokes, sunflowers, amaranth, quinoa, tomatoes, potatoes, and many other vigorous crops. With slashmulch, there’s really no weed problem at all, because the lawn controls other weeds, and then becomes the mulch to grow crops. It’s a great system that’s probably been used by humans for millennia.
Once I’m growing all these crops in Type 2 Guilds, I can dramatically reduce the size of my intensive gardens! Then I may only need a few small raised beds, or a small garden area.
With a much smaller intensive garden, I can then easily control edges with fortress plantings and occasional edging.
I can also use what Transformative Adventures teachers call “terminator guilds,” plant communities designed to control a weed problem.
With the garden redesigned into these zones, I find I have far less weeding work to do. And of course, I use the same strategy to deal with all weeds, pests, fertilizing, watering, diseases, and every other garden problem. I also use it on my finances!
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