How to turn weeds into your food garden friends

 There is a huge industry making money from creating the perception that weeds are our enemies, whether you are a food gardener or not, weeds are there to be destroyed. Once you are prepared to accept this industry story, a compelling need for expensive and often toxic inputs of herbicide and fertiliser arises. This is the treadmill of industrialised farming, where sustainability is only reflected in chemical company bank accounts.

My blog this week attempts to turn this paradigm upside down by helping you to understand how important weeds are for soil fertility and how you can tap into this wonderful gift of nature to bring fertility to your food garden and spend nothing on herbicides and virtually nothing on fertilisers.

There is no doubt that all food gardeners are manipulating nature's processes. Here are some examples:

1. Most of the foods crops we grow are not native to where we have our gardens;
2. We concentrate different food crops in small spaces which are unfamiliar with each other (in nature, a symbiosis forms between plants over a long period of time).
3. Biodiverstiy is a fundamental natural principle that ensures long term sustainability, however most gardeners and certainly farmers limit the number of crops they grow, ie they limit biodiversity.

As a result, the soil is challenged to keep up its optimum condition for growing the things you want to consume. There is a very fine balance successful food gardeners strive for in manipulating natures processes and achieving ever increasing soil fertility. This is challenging and is the holy grail of food gardening with organic methods. Every food garden has weeds, but we should consider the term “weed”. Most people see weeds as plants that grow in places where they don't want them to grow, the weeds become unwanted visitors which are to be removed and destroyed.

Surely it is reasonable to appreciate that nature, in all its wonders, provides weeds to us for a positive reason, as part of a renewal process. When you look at weeds in this way, you begin to see they are natures way of healing imbalances in the soil. As soil is depleted through weathering or inappropriate soil fertility measures, more and different weeds will grow. The weeds add carbon and organic matter to the soil, minerals and they help to hold the soil together to minimise erosion.

If you analysed any shovel full of soil, you would find large numbers of weed seeds of all different types. These would have been deposited there by wind, rain, birds and growing over long periods of time. Its quite amazing how long weed seeds can survive with no attention. What's more amazing is that different weeds grow over time, based on the changing in the state of your soil. When your soil has been pushed by too much crops and fertility is low, generally inedible and prickly weeds will grow. As your garden fertility improves, you will find more of your “weeds” are edible.

How do you work with weeds and at the same time maximise your growing space and soil fertility:

1. Firstly, let weeds grow so you can see what nature is giving you. If you heavily mulch your garden every day of the year, the weeds will not have the opportunity to reveal themselves. I am not advocating here that you (a) avoid mulching completely (just do it when moisture retention is an issue) or (b) let the weeds completely takeover your garden.
2. You will see predominant weeds growing at different times of the year depending on climate conditions. Pick most of the weeds out of your garden (yes, this is quite a bit of labour, but its better than poisioning them which kills life in the soil and bring more and different types of weeds to heal it and thus takes much longer).
3. With the weeds you have picked there are three options in using them as resource to give back their fertility to the food garden:
4. Turn the weeds into a liquid or “weed tea”. The dilute the weed tea and pour it onto the garden once per week in same place where you picked the weeds.
5. Pick the weeds and pile them up in your compost heap and put them through a hot composting process which will generally kill the weed seeds but incorporate the qualities of the weeds into the compost.
6. Pull out the weeds and lay them back onto the garden bed where you pulled them out. The worms will draw them back into the soil
7. Its ideal to pick the weeds before they have seeded, but sometimes this will not be possible. With seeded weeds:
8. Its better to use them as a weed tea, rather than laying them back on to the garden or in compost
9. Avoid picking them and spreading their seed in the week before the full moon, as the strong moon forces in that week will help to germinate a lot more weeds.
10. I normally add biodynamic compost preparations to the weed teas and this gives it extra potency to add nutrients to the soil.
11. Minimise the amount of soil in your garden which is left open with no growth you are managing.

Last and certainly, not least, is to consider eating some the “weeds”. Even those dreaded cobbler's pegs are edible. Chick weed grows freely at certain times of the year in our garden and its a common addition to our salads and cooked greens. There's a lot more instructional content in our Gardener subscriber site on weeds, soil fertility practices and how you choose crops based on your soil fertility.

Happy weeding

Authored by Peter Kearney – www.cityfoodgrowers.com.au