Love ‘em or hate ‘em, when it comes to weeds, there’s only one answer –isn’t there?

From my earliest forays into the world of Growing My Own, I was taught to loathe weeds. To engage in a War on the Axis of Gardening Evil that is my abundant supply of docks, nettles, creeping buttercup and couch grass. To blitz them – first with chemicals and then, after a Damascene conversion to organics, with a lifetime of hand weeding.

Weeds are the enemy in yet another gardening turf war (just add them to the war on slugs and greenfly…) and there seems little option but to don the combat gear and ready ourselves for a never-ending conflict that we are bound to lose.

According to gardening lore, ‘one year’s seeds make seven year’s weeds’. By my calculation, (after a few lax years away from the hoe) we have several lifetime’s worth of dormant weed seeds just waiting for a bit of sun and rain to bloom. And while we now do our best to make sure the weeds don’t set seed (thereby hopefully making life a bit easier for my great, great, great grandchildren), I’d have to weed 24/7 365 days a year to win this war.

But maybe we’ve got it wrong – maybe it’s not an ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach that we need, but a bit of peace and reconciliation…

I’m not saying we need to tolerate weedseverywhere. I well remember my bed of carefully-planted ever-so-expensive onion sets that got completely swamped by weeds and came out of the ground – if they came out at all – pretty much the same size they went in. So if you are planting crops in rows on a cleared bed, by all means have your hoe at the ready.

But there is another way. On our holding, we use the Permaculture approach to garden design. This encourages us to accept that weeds are ‘invading’ whether we like it or not, and that we’d be better off (and less stressed) understanding how they work and learning to work alongside them. If we cast weeds not as ‘enemies’, but ‘teachers’ and ‘resources’, how can they help us in our gardening?

- Annual weeds self-seed easily – not surprising, as many of them are our native wildflowers by another name. If we learn from the weeds and select native varieties of fruits and veggies for our GYO plots, they are more likely to do well than half-hardy annuals which need a lot of TLC to get them through one of our summers. 

- Perennial weeds like dock and dandelion have long taproots that mine minerals deep underground. Their leaves and roots are ‘dynamic accumulators’ of beneficial nutrients that cost a small fortune when you have to buy them in a packet. Just compost the leaves (without seeds) to get all that free goodness for the garden. Perennials are also often first away in the spring – the permanent root system underground gives them a head start when it comes to the new season. By using some permanent planting in our GYO gardens, we too can often hit the ground running when it comes to early crops.

- Doug Larson said ‘a weed is a plant that has mastered all survival skills except for learning how to grow in rows’. I’ve never seen nature do ‘straight’ and it certainly wouldn’t grow veg in rows the way we do. Instead, nature works through a multitude of different plants, animals and other organisms growing together. These natural ecosystems have complexity and diversity which makes them very resilient and positively Rambo-esque in their ability to survive. Mixing things up a bit on our GYO gardens can mean that if one crop fails, another is there to take its place – and there may be all sorts of beneficial things going on under the soil that wouldn’t be happening if you just had a monocrop of cabbages or carrots.  

- Weeds love disturbed soil – digging and tilling is nirvana to those decades of dormant weed seeds. So our normal way of growing veg leaves the door wide open for a whole lot of new weeds to poke their head above soil level. We can either:

1 Put up with this and resign ourselves to a lot of weeding or

2 We can use a no-dig method of cultivation (read Organic Gardening: The Natural No-dig Way by Charles Dowding for more information about this technique) or

3 We can understand that the ‘weeds’ are playing the role of pioneer species and helping to stabilize soils, halt degradation and allow less vigorous native species to follow on behind.

The sort of weed you have can be a great indicator of the type and condition of the soil you have – what do your weeds tell you about your plot?

Many weeds are edible or medicinal or both - plantain, burdock, stinging nettle, yes, even my own bête noir - couch grass. Just about everything you consider a weed in your veg patch will have been used in some way in the past as a food or in the household or as medicine. Sometimes all we need to do to love our weeds is to eat them!

So while we don’t put up with weeds everywhere, we’ve been able to kick back a little and enjoy a better relationship with them. We eat them (lots of them are great as salad herbs), use them to keep the house clean or make interesting things with them. We use the leaves of our dynamic accumulators in compost and make ‘stinky weed soup’ of the roots and seeds – adding lots of nutrients to the growing areas - (the smell disappears quickly but don’t get it on your clothes!).

Can you find a way to love your weeds?