Ah, the wonderful world of weeds! They’re here to greet us in early spring and they keep us busy until it snows again. Our beautiful gardens of Eden can easily become our gardens of weedin’ and if you can’t see the forest for the trees – well, for some, you can’t see their gardens for the weeds.
Weeds are defined as ‘undesirable plants, considered to be useless, cumbersome or troublesome.’
Basically this means that they can range from pigweed to petunias, from dainty to devilish. In Ken Thompson’s The Book of Weeds – How to Deal With Plants That Behave Badly, he writes: “Since the dawn of gardening history, horticulturists have waged ceaseless war against a ruthless invader. From the lawns of stately homes to miniscule urban plots, weeds have been the gardener’s perennial enemy.” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s version of a weed is: “Simply a plant whose virtues haven’t yet been discovered.” So I suppose it’s all about perspective. But generally speaking, weeding can either be an easy exercise or a royal pain in the grass.
Weeds possess a multitude of takeover tactics and techniques. For instance, there are those marauders like the relentlessly roaming rhizomes of couch grass, others that deploy wafting white parachutes that float their seeds willy-nilly in the wind like dandelions and some that produce wee weeds for next year’s crop by shooting them out from seed pods. Others produce bazillions of bulbetts too tiny to detect and then there’s weeds that actually get stimulated to grow even more of them when messed with. There are happy hookers like burrs that hitchhike about on unsuspecting passersby and vines that send runners to randomly claim more real estate. Taproots can tunnel so deep that you need to excavate a 3-ft. hole to extract them and the big brutes require the bucket of a backhoe.
Then to add insult to injury, factor in those nasty weeds that pose considerable risk to us gardeners, such as the ones armed with sharp thorns, prickly stems and nasty stingers. Sometimes we win the battle but other times we can be totally defeated once they take hold, requiring complete soil removal and starting from scratch. Ugh!
To nip the situation in the bud, we gardeners have a number of weed-busting strategies to out-smart and out-gun them. The most effective means of counter-attack is simply using the ‘best before date’ method, which is dealing with the weeds before the problem gets out of hand. We can dig them out before they get big and belligerent, decapitate or weed-wack ’em before they waft away, imprison them within barriers before they intrude or smother and suffocate before they spread and spray. Some may still resort to lethal liquidation, but remember, that always comes with a price to the rest of the un-targeted critters around them.
Other ways to avoid your weeding woes is to: a) bullet-proof your garden beds and borders with impenetrable deep barriers (versatile Dinoflex mats work the best for me.); b) don’t buy or accept plants with dodgy backgrounds and questionable origins, like the ones you buy at community plant sales, or the new exotic goodies at the store, without doing some due diligence first, c) clean off all root balls as best as you can if they came from another garden and don’t use that soil; d) have rich, loose soils for ease of extraction;, e) consider what your soil conditions are in case you’ve created the perfect environment for those weeds to grow in; f) use the ‘when in doubt, leave it out’ rule for your compost; and lastly, g) get rid of the dirty players in your gardens for good and replace them with something less troublesome.
“Weeds” can be the good guys too, and perhaps we could be more attentive of their purpose and perfection. They grow in places to bring needed nutrients up to the surface or to fix nutrient imbalances in depleted or damaged soils, so maybe we could learn to be plant whisperers and listen to what they’re trying to tell us. They can enrich your compost or can be used as a healthy mulch cover by using the chop and drop method. Weeds can be highly nutritious as well as a culinary delight and can possess important medicinal qualities.
Weeding can be a pleasure or a pain, but either way, try to whistle while you work and take the opportunity while you’re at it to find ways to weed out some of the unwanted problems in your life.