Weeds from Bronwyn's Perspective

Weeds: Every gardener's worst nightmare (aside from animal pests and insects, of course).

Seriously. Who actually likes weeding? I know I don't. I hate it, actually. I hate it with a burning passion. Thankfully the regularity of the square foot garden makes it SUPER easy to tell when there are plants there shouldn't be, and once the seedlings come up you know to pull anything that doesn't look like those seedlings.

As I was weeding the TINY plantlets (nothing is going to get huge on my watch!) yesterday, I got one that had leaves which were no bigger than a dime, mostly smaller- but it brought a HUGE clump of roots when I tugged it out. This reminded me of the things I learned when I took Weed Science at Cornell- officially one of the most difficult and most rewarding classes I'd ever taken. I loved it. Weeds are INCREDIBLY interesting.

Thinking back, I've always kind of had a "thing" for weeds. Lets go back to elementary school- one of my favorite people and my go-to person for those cheesy Black History Month reports we'd always have to write was George Washington Carver. Yeah, the peanut guy- if you know anything about him, you also know that he wasn't all about peanuts, but he was also one of the original proponents of continuing to use natural means of keeping the soil productive rather than just pouring on chemicals or leaving the land fallow. Amazing man- I love him. But he had this wonderful quote that I quite enjoyed: "A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place." This was something that always struck me- especially considering that I was a big fan of dandelions- one of the green-lawn lover's worst nightmares.

We had a pseudo compost pile in my childhood home- it started out well but as often happened my father flubbed it a bit and then it became a place to dump the cat litter. It was fenced in and really was just a pile of.. stuff. On the chicken wire fence, what I always called "morning glories" would grow, along with a pretty little Solanaceaous (nightshade) weed that had adorable little purple flowers that were exactly like a tomato flower in every way except purple. It had green little fruits that I of course never ate even though I had no idea that they were poisonous- my mum told us never to eat anything (except for the black-caps) like that, so I didn't.

Now, anywhere else- those would be weeds. The "morning glory?" That was bindweed. Bindweed is a particularly awful weed that farmer and gardeners alike DESPISE, but when it's just growing up alongside a little fence it's lovely. And in crop rotations for farmers, you'll run into a situation where they're growing potatoes this year but there's a corn "volunteer" from previous years- that's considered a weed as well (this is also one reason why "round-up ready" crops have so much potential to be a problem, but that's for another post).

So with such a fuzzy definition of what a weed is, you can really only judge by characteristics a plant might have that would make them "weedy" in the average garden situation.

1. Fast Growth- "weedy species" will tend to grow VERY quickly when provided with good conditions (like those in a garden). The whole idea is to grow fast so the weeds will be able to drown out the actual crop by blocking sun, sucking up water and nutrients, and in some cases just taking up space.
2. Long Seed Life- These species have seeds that can sit in the soil for YEARS (some weeds will last 10+ years in the soil!) until just the right conditions present themselves- at which point they'll grow quickly and try to knock out the other weeds.
3. Adaptations for efficiency- Like the tiny plant with the large root system I pulled- weedy species will tend to have something to increase efficiency, whether it be an extensive root system or adapted leaf structure. You'll see this in any plant, but especially weeds- their roots can change depending on where the water is. Shallow roots= water near the surface, but a good weed will also automatically grow deeper roots if the water is further down.
4. Inhibiting compounds- this is something that's just now starting to come into light and is extremely difficult to study, but some plants will secrete compounds to inhibit the growth of other plants- indeed, it was originally thought that this number was smaller, but now there's speculation that MOST plants have some sort of behavior like this- wow! But if a species has a marked inhibitive effect on other plants in the vicinity.. that's a species with high weed potential.
5. Hard To Kill- these are the plants with underground stems, clonal propagation, runners, prolific seed numbers, deep taproots... Stuff that'll come back in force if you chop it up with a hoe instead of pulling it in one piece, or anything that spreads out underground too quickly to stem. If it does this, there's potential for it to be a weed (Mint is one of these plants- that's why many places will suggest you sink a five gallon bucket into the ground and plant it in there.)

Are you fascinated yet? I just love this kind of thing. Weeds really are fascinating.. but since this post is getting kind of long I'll have to post more about it later. Just remember- if you see a weed that's a baby, pull it. It's just going to get harder later.