Module 6: What’s a Weed?
Strike a Balance with Nature's Pioneers
Introduction
In truth, there is no scientific definition of a weed. A “weed” doesn’t fall into any genus or species. A weed is simply any unwanted plant in your garden.
I’m not so greenwashed to proclaim “there’s no such thing as a weed.” It’s perfectly fine to choose what you want growing in your cultivated space and what you don’t. Unwanted plants take up space, water, and sunshine — key resources especially in small gardens. It’s also perfectly natural to prefer plants that are useful to you in some way, be they edible, medicinal, fragrant, or butterfly-attracting.
I would like to ask, however, what about the many plants that could be useful to more people if they only knew how to use them?
Let’s take dandelions, as an example. Lots of people go to great lengths to get rid of them, including the application of truly noxious chemicals they may oppose on moral grounds. Some of these folks are probably just conditioned to do so, pressured by neighbors and such. But perhaps just as many would feel more friendly towards dandelions if they knew how to use them. Dandelion leaves are perfectly edible and especially nice when harvested young and tender. The blossoms can be made into wine and jelly. A food forest gardener friend of mine likes to say, “A weed is just an herb you haven’t met yet.” Perhaps we would see fewer plants as weeds if we got to know them a little better?
However, while I advocate for educating yourself on the potential usefulness of “weedy” plants common in your area, I’m not trying to convince you to welcome every interloper into your garden. It’s your space, your sanctuary, and you get to choose what’s in it.
So, barring those noxious chemicals of course, what are your best weed-controlling options?
Diversity is Fundamental
All living things have one most important goal: survival. From the dense rainforest to the open desert, the governing principle of species and ecosystems is diversity. Diversity is the key to resilience. A pristine lawn of one species (grass) and a tidy garden of a few vegetables are thus inherently weak and vulnerable, prime candidates for diversification.
In nature's scheme of things, weeds are more correctly hardy pioneers staking out your sterile lawn and orderly garden to make a more hospitable home for more forms of life: insects, spiders, birds, and even mammals. Garden pests are really opportunistic scavengers decimating your cultivars to make room for more weedy pioneers.
Lesson: While your main goal in planting a garden is probably to grow food, nature will make room for diversity in any way possible. If you want a resilient garden, you need to create a diverse garden. If you don’t nature will do it for you, and you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.
Prescription: Plant a diversity of species: edible, herbal, medicinal, and "ornamental." Plant species of different bloom times, fruit times, and seed setting times. Plant species of varying heights, root types, and root depths. Strive to create a diversity with useful plants so nature doesn't do it for you with weeds.
Set Boundaries
When I first started planting my tiny urban gardens, I liked to pick up cheap books on home gardening at used bookstores, or filch them out of boxes of free stuff people would leave on their steps. Most of these books were of the Better Homes and Garden variety. I remember there was always big to-do in these books about “the border.” Because I had no idea about anything I’m writing about now, at the time “the border” just looked like a thick row of pretty plants with leaves and flowers of different shapes and colors. A decoration.
As I became a more seasoned gardener, I began to see how I missed the function of the border for the ornament. Of course the border can be a beautiful way to announce the garden’s presence. But a border of sturdy plants also creates a boundary, a line in the earth, between your cultivated area and the wild hinterland beyond — or the lawn.
A densely planted border enclosing your culivated space is your first line of defense against weeds. The best way to draw your line in the earth is by planting sturdy, self-regenerating perennials.
Perennials occupy a liminal space between cultivar and weed. Their hardier and more wild nature is a much closer match for unwanted invaders. Perennials’ deep roots penetrate deep below the topsoil to help to prevent weeds from spreading underground and the shade they cast keeps sun-hungry weeds at a distance above ground.
Perennials to consider for a weed-blocking barrier
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, Thyme
Technically, parsley is an biennial, but it will seed itself in the 2nd year (if it survives the winter) and re-sprout if allowed. But this tried-and-true bouquet garni is the soul in any soup.
Sorrel, Lamb’s Quarters and Good King Henry
Nutritious and flavorful greens. Sorrel is lemon-y, Good King Henry is spinach-y, and Lambs Quarters are chard-like. They make an excellent addition to soup, salad, or stir-fry. Strategically planted at the back border of the garden, their vigorous growth shades and fends off marauding weeds.
Chives
Nothing comes close to fresh chopped chives added to homemade salad dressing or atop a baked potato. They are super easy to grow and their purple blossoms are a magnet for bees.
Egyptian Walking Onions
Quite possibly one of the most interesting plants you can grow in your garden, Egyptian onions look like scallions topped off with a pink party hat of a flower. Then the flower turns into a bulb that drops toward the ground. When the bulb touches down, a new shoot springs up and starts the process all over again. It's not exactly walking, but for a plant it comes pretty close. Egyptian opinions can be used in any dish where you would use scallions or leeks.
Echinacea, Bee Balm, Yarrow, Lavender
These plants bear beautiful flowers attractive to pollinators and beneficial predator bugs (the ones that eat pests). They are all wonderful for herbal infusions to drink or at-home spa facial treatment (better than Aveda, and free!). Or you can make dried arrangements, sachets, or naturally scented eye bags.
Artemisia/Mugwort
Artemisia thrives in dry, arid climates — you can see it all over in the deserts of the American Southwest. If you are in the humid mid-Atlantic or Southeast, make sure you plant it in sandy dry soil and trim off drooping foliage regularly. Dried and braided with sage leaves, it makes a wonderful smudge stick to purify your home.
Horseradish
The ultimate hardy garden survivor, horseradish is definitely a taste worth acquiring.
Rhubarb
Requires cold winter to thrive. Starts easily as seed during the growing season and will be ready to harvest in the second year. The stalks are edible — the rest of the plant is toxic to humans.
Strawberry, Raspberry, Blackberry, & many other berry plants
There is no substitution for a fruit picked fresh off the plant at its peak ripeness. There are species of edible fruits far beyond anything they sell us in the grocery stores - do your research to find out what can thrive in your area.
Strategize!
Long-haul perennials start off more slowly than one-and-done annuals, but they regenerate larger and lusher in the garden each year. So give them plenty of space when you plant them, even if they are small.
While you are waiting for your perennials to get established, fill in the gaps with fast growing annuals. When perennial plants become really large, you can dig them up and divide them (in early spring) and then re-plant the sections--or give some away!
Top Fast-Growing Annuals to fill in the gaps
Sweet Alyssum
With small delicate blossoms ranging from deep purples and pale pinks to white and yellow, these ground-hugging and fast-spreading sweet alyssum are the natural choice to fill in the front of your border. Try interplanting it with creeping thyme, clover, or parsley. Starts easily as seed.
Marigold
Cheerful flowers with a spicy peppery scent, marigolds are a sturdy annual favorite. All species of Tagetes — Marigold’s genus — produce edible blossoms. Tagetes lucida (aka ‘Mexican tarragon’) is fully edible and is a great substitute for French tarragon in warmer climates.
Basil
Don’t limit yourself to one kind! Basil comes in many fabulous varieties; Italian, Thai, lemon, purple — try them all. Basil is easy to grow provided it gets plenty of heat and sun.
Borage
Soft periwinkle blossoms make a striking complement for orange-hued calendula and marigolds. The flower and leaves are delicious in salads and can also be infused in oil for their anti-inflammatory properties
Calendula
Plant with borage for a perfect pair. Calendula also has anti-inflammatory effects — infuse along with borage for a skin nourishing DIY moisturizer. The blossoms are also perfectly edible.
Nasturtium
In addition to peppery tasting leaves and bright edible flowers, nasturtium also grows vigorously, shading out weeds. You can find both clumping and vining varieties. Vining types will spread out and climb whatever they can, while clumping types keep more to themselves.
Dill
Feathery light foliage, big yellow bee-attracting flowers, and you can make dill pickles. It can get tall, so keep it toward the middle-to-back-of the garden.
Sunflower
Annual sunflowers — Helianthus annuus — range in height from 2 to 12 feet and have huge brilliant flowers loaded with edible seeds. Taller varieties are great for making a natural barrier or hiding a fence. The petals are edible as are the seeds when still white & immature — you can harvest the entire head and cook it on the grill.
Mulch for cover
As discussed in Module 2: Build Soil, organic mulch materials like straw, leaves, and wood chips help to stabilize soil temperature, retain moisture, and shelter beneficial insects. Thick mulch, generously applied, will also help to suppress weeds, but suppress is the key word here. Weeds are nature’s pioneers. Given time, they will colonize even deeply mulched soil. And weeds are infinitely tougher than your precious cultivars.
To stamp out weeds with a bit more vigor, you can also use sturdier materials for mulch. Thick layers of newspaper, sheets of cardboard, and even sheets or old carpets do a great job of shading out weeds. They also do an excellent job of killing the most invasive weed of all: grass.
Using these bulkier materials as mulch is actually a form of composting in place called sheet mulching, that we also introduced back in the first Module!
For shading out (i.e. killing) a large area of weeds or grass you want to plant with something useful, here’s a very effective technique I observed a personal friend of mine use to great success:
First, the entire surface of a dug-and-manure-prepped small front yard would be covered with a heavy black tarp. Then, small holes would be cut in the tarp for delicata squash seeds to be sown in the exposed mounds of soil. As the seeds germinated, the tarp shaded out unwanted plant growth. When the squash vines began to develop and spread out, the the tarp would be removed to reveal patches of now weed-free soil for the vines to colonize. When the vines matured and the big leaves began to unfurl, the whole tarp would be removed and saved for next season.
Know the difference between weeds and what you planted
It’s exciting to experiment growing new fruits and vegetables but sometimes you don’t know what they look like in their infancy. When you get more seasoned as a gardener you can play with creative planting shapes. As a beginner, plant seeds in straight rows or neat blocks and on the same day. The vegetables will grow at the same pace and line up uniformly. Weeds are opportunists and grow rapidly wherever they can.
If you tossed dill, marigold or poppy seeds willy-nilly, not to worry about accidentally mistaking them for weeds. Walk around your neighborhood and notice what plants seem to be haphazardly sprouting in your neighbor’s yards, flower pots, and mulched beds. You’ll start to see the same weeds, especially in a woefully ignored green space. Look up at the trees to see which are laden with seed pods. The pods will make their way into your garden either by wind or by squirrel.
Keep a doodle drawing of the garden. Refer to it if you are unsure if that lone green tendril in the corner was actually planted by you or carried by the wind. Or you can stake popsicle sticks in your gardens, writing in permanent marker what’s planted where.
Plant squash, peppers or tomato seeds in the center of a mound surrounded by a circular “moat” to filter water. This serves as a quick visual because anything sprouting in the moat or off-center on the mound is an interloper.
Lastly, I have learned weeds always grow faster than anything else. If it’s tall and hogging up the sunlight early in the growing season, it’s a weed.
Weeding is all about timing
Unless the soil is loose and sandy, wait until the day after it rains to weed. The earth will be a bit muddy but it’s soft and much easier to pull deep-rooted weeds. Pulling the entire weed cleanly out of the soil is key. Break off the top of an errant blade of grass and it’ll grow back in a few day’s time, but pull out the root and it is gone for good.
Use Weeds to your advantage
If a plant that doesn’t spread laterally, you can use it as a mulch producer. Chop-and-drop rather than pulling out the root. As the plant regenerates it will mine the deep soil for nutrients you can then spread around the garden. Burdock — which produces a long edible root — is a great example of this.
If weeds are colonizing a patch of earth that you have plans for — say you have seeds starting that aren’t quite ready to be transplanted — allow the natural growth to occur until you’re ready to plant. The vegetation will keep the soil shaded, moist, and healthy. If the weed is vigorously invasive however, it may be a better idea to pull it and sow a cover crop such as clover or vetch until the target species are ready to be planted.
If a natural groundcover begins to colonize the soil below your taller cultivars, monitor its growth. Nature will diversify our gardens for us, saving us time and money and work.
How you approach the task of weeding can also bend to both your disposition and your schedule.
I confess I have never weeded my garden in a goal focused start-to-finish way. As a freelance yoga teacher, I worked seven days a week most of the year, but my working hours also allowed me to spend at least a short time in my garden every day. When I went out to harvest greens to make a salad, I’d pause to pull out a young pokeweed or two. For people who work long days or in an office all week, the weekend is a chance to tackle weeding as a project to be completed in one day.
Both ways work. There’s more than one path through a food forest. Whether the activity is weeding, soil-cultivating, planting, harvesting, or gathering seed, find your own rhythm that works for you.
Here is a great way to use "weeds" and semi-wild plants in a delicious pesto sauce. Includes a list of common edible plants that could very well already be in your yard: https://www.sdvforest.com/offgrid-kitchen/the-garden-foragers-pesto-sauce
And, here's a great resource (with photos) of more common edible "weeds" with tips on how to use them.
http://www.themudhome.com/mudbuilding/foraging-my-9-favourite-edible-greens