i just hoidayed in a village that was quiet wild and over grown compared to the majority of english villages and loved it. i never liked my grandmothers lawn as much though it was great for playing games on and though i was happy at her house, i liked the crazy somerset village with apple trees at the back of the house, prunned trees have a gret attraction for me, and such a luxoriouse growth of holly and stinging nettles and grass and things like cranes bill in the walls an unclipped and rampant version of nature that is prettier. I just learnt to find everything overgrown so attractive. I also heard my mothers enthusiasm for a lack of clipped hedges and lawns as wel as seeing how pretty it was. so for me it was easy to look for the same effect. rose macaksie.
in famring and gardening maybe the weeds are not so much for pure enjoyemnt of the savage exuberance of nature when we are not clipping it all the time, think of how attractive the roots of trees are co¡vering the remains of temples in India i suppose they would not be there in England, we would cut them so we could see the ruiins better, they are for helping with ruined soils tha tcrops plants wont grow in.
If you are vegetable gardening or farming it is more that weeds will serve as a cover crop in winter or you could return to natural pastures which are full of weeds and they do serve if your soil is very spoilt to return the balance they are hardy and can bare the bad soils that need plants to return them to health. Tot use weeds like this is slower than masses of mulch geoff lawton put a foot and a half of mulch on the desert he greened, that is a lot i think its about the depth of all your hand and arm to your elbow, but then not everyone finds getting a lot of mulch in easy, i know i dont. and then weeds serve to keep the soil covered and to dig down deep and as nitrogen fixing plants i suppose there is always a i hve to take up some weeds to or choppe them to giv erooom for what i am growing .
the
nitrogen fixing trees that the permaculurist palnst are meant to serve as a supply of mulch with their leaf fall and i suppose you can clip them and use the trimmings as mulch.
the indian of the three sisters fame used to grow in mounds of earth dotted round i feild i suppose full of weeds is one way of using weeds with things you ucltivate.
you can chop and drop the weeds that grow with your crop so they produce mulch and your cuttign them gives the crops a bit of acdvantage, work in the garden is exercise fo rht egardener gardening is the biggest sport in america. .
They should be good if the soil is so spoilt it wont grow crops unless you are going to put on a lot of fertiliser, when weeds are the only thing that will grow and restablish soils a bit, the case in my garden.
Weeds are used in the water gardens that people have round the great lakes and in chicago alleys,they use the water gardens to clean up run off so water from roads and parking spaces with maybe a bit of petrol in it and pahtogens from dustbin waste does not go into the drains and from their the great lakes untreateed they run it to the water garden where the roots of the plants and the microorganisms round the roots clean impurities out of the water. a water garden works like a sand filter with the addition of plants to digest pahtogens as well as microbes in the soil.
Coccanouer whose books there is a ¡link to in the dandylion theread says that iweeds sort out imbalances in the soil. He was talking of aorchard that had been heavily frertilised where the trees where falling ill. I dont know what the weeds did to h lep the trees maybe too much nitrogen had accumulated in layers that the rain wahsed the nitrogen down in ¡to and burnt the tree roots, maybe the deeper roots of the weeds took up the nitrogen and brought it to the surface.
i heard a long time ago some where of a woman who was n¡enthusiastic about the earth capacity to restore itself she fenced of areas in polluted areas to whatch how m¡nature took over and how it reestablished the ehalth of the soil stories like that make you want to whatch nature at work. rose macaskie.
Darrel Dougherty says if you fertilise a lot things dont grow deep roots they dont need to search for nutrients and you only get a very thin layer of top soil.