Invite Them In
“Weeds” are a State of Mind
I have a small plot of land in Seattle. We have a little house, a fairly large sized yard with a lot of Southern exposure, and access to a wild green-space abundant with Big-leaf Maples (Acer macrophyllum). I’ve been slowly trying to turn our yard into a food source for our family, and started by scraping out a few garden plots in the front yard. I’ve been spending most of the time amending the soil — a couple of years of sheet mulching, compost application, cover cropping, low intensity annual cropping. This year, I’m finally ready to plant some plants on a larger scale. I can tell because the soil in the garden plots is finally home to a bunch of “weeds.”
The idea that “weeds” exist as competitors with your garden plants is mostly a carry-over from farm-scale projects, where yeah, they may be a concern. I’d imagine my co-editor Tim may have a different perspective on some of this stuff, since he’s up to a different kind of growing model and has different needs and concerns.
But, if you’re just growing stuff around the house or in a parking strip for your family to eat, it’s way easier to just relax about the “volunteer species” who show up between your rows of carrots and kale. If you learn about what they do and what they indicate, you can manage them, just like the rest of your crops, and eventually you’ll discover they’re all useful parts of the garden community.
(One thing: this is only applicable if you’re not using nasty chemical pesticides or fertilizers. One of the nicest things about gardening organically is that you can use pretty much anything that decides to grow in your garden, not just what you’ve planted. If you spray Round-up all over your yard or your dandelions, what happens if you decide you want to have a dandelion salad? You have to go buy dandelions that cost money.)
I always get super excited when I start to see chickweed (Stellaria media) cropping up in the beds I’m prepping for the year. Not only is it a super delicious green in salads or pies or pestoes or smooties, it also indicates that the soil is really nice and fertile. If you are concerned about other weeds like dandelions, chickweed makes for a great ground-cover that will block out other guys. People, eat your chickweed — it’s so good! Oh, and it’s FULL of vitamin C, and it also makes a really effective salve for skin conditions.
Nipplewort (Lapsana communis) is another yummy volunteer who pops up in my area. You can spot it because most leaves have two little lobe-shaped leaflets behind the main leaf structure. It’s related to dandelion, but it’s a lot sweeter. You can use it for anything that you’d use spinach for. Its tastier when it’s younger, but if you let it grow, it can get tall and stately and covered in nifty little yellow blossoms that native pollinators really dig on.
Instead of spending $7 on a couple of bags of salad greens or potherbs, you can easily snag a pound or two of chickweed and nipplewort if you let them stick around in your garden.
Neither of these guys are major competitors for resources with any common garden annual. Chickweed’s root system is super shallow, and since it mats on runners, it doesn’t take up a lot of soil resources. Nipplewort has a small taproot, but nothing that will get in the way of your kale. In my experience, you can plant your usual crops right in with these guys, and won’t see any decrease in productivity or plant health.
Dandelion’s many uses should go without saying. The greens and roots are edible. The flowers are pretty, and bees love them, and you can make wine out of them.
Shotweed (Cardamine hirsuta), aka Hairy bittercress, is another “weed” that shows up everywhere but nobody ever uses. It’s a super-spicy brassica — just like mustard, arugula, watercress, and if you use it raw it’s like eating a mild horseradish. You’ve seen these guys — they’re all over the place, and when you brush your hands over the seedpods, they shoot into the air, spreading the spicy goodness.
These are just a couple of examples, but what I think I’m trying to express are a couple of basic principles that I’ll keep returning to again and again:
- A garden is a community, and you’re part of it. We’re all in a garden, whether or not we recognize that fact. We can participate in it by growing good plants and helping other members of the garden grow, or we can make a shitty garden by growing more chemically-treated lawns. It’s up to you to decide how you want to participate, and who you’d like to invite to help. This is true regardless of whether you’re gardening in your yard, or a parking strip, or you’re growing a couple of nice potato plants in an apartment.
- Creating more work is silly. There can be a lot of work — physical and mental — involved in gardening. This is why I think it’s smart to find ways to use what’s already there instead of fretting about how to get rid of it. Turn grass into nitrogen using sheet mulching. Turn your fall leaves into mulch instead of bagging them up and sending them away. And turn your “weeds” into members of the garden community that benefit the whole, including your tummy.
- Food is everywhere. If you know where to look, you can find nutritious food in lots of places you might not expect.
A lot of these ideas can be found in Permaculture, but I don’t want to get too wonky about it just yet. Suffice to say, a little thinking and a little rationality can get you a long way when you’re working with the world’s vital forces, and that’s the kind of thing I hope to write about in this venture.
Welcome to invironment. It only gets better from here.
About the author:
Jeremy Puma is a student of Permaculture. He writes things, cooks stuff, and can also be found at StrangeAnimal.net and Magirology.net.
