Weeds and other pests grow 24/7.. twice as fast when its over 90. There's only so much time you can and should spend on them. Make it count.
(Strategy #1 If you can't beat 'em, make 'em join you)
...
- Weeds as volunteer soil stewards
- Weeds as free soil test kits
- Weeds as home-gym + health spa
- Weeds as saint-makers
- Weeds as volunteer soil stewards
This really is the bottom line of growing things: Your job is to capture as much energy for life as possible (primarily from the sun) and put it intelligently into the cycle that supports you.
At fairly rare but key points this life will come from the aesthtetics and enjoyment of a clean (bare) soil/mulch surface, or an absolute monoculture of crops/ornamentals. But MUCH more often every square inch of your soil needs to be making hay (stored chemical energy) while the sun shines...
If there's a weed growing there, it means there's energy, water, and fertility that would otherwise have been lost: Sunlight that would have just been baking the life out of your soil. Nitrogen and other nutrients that would have been volatizing into the atmosphere or sinking into the subsoil. Moisture that would have been evaporated away. All kept in play. All yours to harvest and harness when and if they actually do start competing with your crops.
- Groom them with a rake ( I was surprised at how much this quick fix "helped" leading me to believe that half my compulsion to weed is aesthetic).
- Give em a hair-cut with some lawn shears, and leave the clippings as "mulchpost".
- Pulling the easy ones up by the roots (automagically cultivates and loosen the soil for removing the noxious ones and can, again, automagically, mix soil on top of pre-scattered crop seed).
- Toss them in the compost pile.
- Give 'em to the chickens and rabbits as a treat.
- Set them aside for mulch,
- Weeds as free soil test kits.
Dynamic accumulators. Thats what some weeds are. They specialize in mopping up or mining out specific nutrients. Some of your crops might need a boost of those nutrients. Next year plant them where those weeds grew best. This year.. well.. if Mohammed can't come to the mountain, rip it up by the roots and bring it to him.
Also. Some weeds are remediation specialists (fancy name for soil rebuilders) when your soil has specific problems, you'll see these first. Let them do their work long enough and you'll have an improved garden. Atleast learn what their presence means so you can improve the soil.
- Weeds as home-gym
First though, an aside about Gardening in general, and a rant on the "back-breaking" work it supposedly demands..
- Tending the soil is a labor of love. In time you re-shape, grow, and adapt to meet it as much as the soil does to meet you and your needs. If you don't love it, don't submit to it.
- The only backs that are broken gardening are the ones that spend too much time hunched over trying to milk a living out of a machine or a computer.. The land doesn't work the way a machine does, try to work it harder or faster and you'll fail. Painfully. Instead, enter into it's rhythms. Make hay when the sun shines. Make hot chocolate (and plans) when its cold and rainy. It's a dance, if you want to lead, you do it with your eyes, your head, and subtle changes.. not with brawn, because nature weighs more than you do.
- In general there's two sides to all garden work. Some people might say it depends on whether you're a glass-is-half-full or a glass-is-half-empty sort of person as to which side is prominent, but I find it depends more on if the mosquitoes are out or not, so kill the mosquitoes:
-
- It has actual value and is genuinely satisfying (it's hugely substantial, and not doing it has cumulative consequences)
- It is quiet and contemplative (it's tedious)
- It is familiar and even familial (it's repetitive, and never-ending)
Now, about the actual work that weeding (should you decide to do it) involves, and this is for the most intensive and effective way of weeding - completely by hand.
- Hands/fingers
There's no tool that has ever been made that is as good as human digits at getting stubborn weeds out. There never will be. Your hands know this. From time to time you'll notice that they have mysteriously dropped your favorite tool half a row back and are happily, precisely, and successfully eradicating the exact weeds you don't want in and amongst the over babied crops you do want. They don't gobble up vast acreages in mere minutes like waving a magic wand (a hoe) or draging a one ton plow, and this is always frustrating to those of us who've seen the quick cheap results such tools seem to yield. But I repeat, there is no tool that is as good as a pair of human hands at getting rid of stubborn weeds. And addiction to quick cheap results is something that needs weeding worse than an acre of crabgrass.
(If your doing alot of hand weeding, you might try getting some tough medical gloves (the puncture resistant kind that cops and emt folk have to wear) and luxuriate in being able to weed with surgical precision without getting dirty fingernails, and farmer fingers. I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like it oughta help.)
- Torso, Legs, and Backs.. (broken and otherwise)
- With the exception of pulling up vast ammounts of mature grasses (like finished corn stalks or any other +4ft weed) weeding isn't the sort of exercise to quickly drain or build up individual muscles much. It's the ten thousand slightly different repetitions of kneel down - lean in - support self - find weed - lean further in (without support) - hold aside crop plant with one hand - gently but irresistably tug out weed - toss into pile - lean further/ duck-walk down row - straighten up - walk elsewhere - repeat.. that gets you. But
- Indefinables
Here's where the real benefits are. Forget the specific muscles. The activity of weeding is good for the whole you. Systemically. Pumping lymphatic fluid around, Vitamin D production, Sweating out toxins, building up the endurance and willpower that make life possible and the evening's ease into something more re-creation-al than post 9-5 job couch-potatoing.
- Weeds as Saint-makers
When you're repeatedly in the hot sun, facing tiny little things .. and losing.. you begin to change. City-folk mistake it for becoming a simpleton. But to work with humus is to be humbled, to ponder what it means ".. you are dust, unto dust you shall return".
I admit.. The thoughts that come out there are simple and few. Also theres a perennial temptation to dismiss them as silly and shallow in the face of all the desperate "real" goings-on out in the "real world". But the schemes and fevered goings on of the world will soon return to the nothingness from whom they spirated.. Miles wide, millimeters deep, and moving nowhere at the speed of light.
Besides,
To return to the weedpatch for an example... Lets say, I scrape the crown of this crabgrass plant. The very next day it will be back, because I think I'm done I've moved on. In one week it will be just as hale as it ever was. In the two or three weeks time it'll probably take for me return to that spot to be greeted by the disdain full laughter of the lower life forms it is I who'll be the weaker, not they.
Welp, the heat of the day (the time I spend schemeing and writing blog stuff) is over. Time to return to the weed patch.. I mean.. the garden.
(To be continued)