Garden Maintenance: Weeds

Weeds are anything besides what we want to grow there. When they say "One man's weed is another's gorgeous Rose", in some cases this is true. However, when we are looking for a very specific end, regarding a plant type, almost anything can qualify as "weed" that does not help our plant develop. What happens is that any other plants, once established, draw nourishment from the same soil as the plant we care to see. While it might be cool to find some flower popping up in the midst of your tomatoes, later on we soon realize that that pretty flower made the tomato grow at a lesser rate - in every respect. Not only does a weed, therefore, take the finite amount of nourishment out of the soil which we intended for our own seedling, but many other things happen as well.

The "volunteer" plant uses our water too. Indeed, many volunteers are amazingly thirsty. Other weed plants can steal the water destined for our baby and reduce by an amazing percentage how much water our plant gets to use. A weed can also prohibit the sun from hitting the intended subject plant as well, especially when it looms higher or wider. Some plants do this. Plants all grow at varying rates. Some - even those who end up not being real large - develop quickly early on, therefore cutting off the sunlight at the most vulnerable ages of the seedling in question.

Weeds can also provide an environment for attracting pests or diseases we need to watch out for with our particular strain. Their own symbiotic relationships with insects may not be what we are looking for with our own babies. Indeed, our plants might be a food source for eggs or larvae. Marigolds, for example, are famous for keeping things away like slugs. The reverse is just as true. Some plants attract exactly those species which could be most destructive to our own.

Weeds can also provide an environment for other weeds. Once the heat gets established in early Summer, the shade and warm conditions make for an amazingly fertile growing ground, not only for our intended plants, but for all the rest, welcome or unwelcome. The shade of a plant can hide what's going in below and provide a more protected growing ground for invasive plants and weeds.

My general rule of thumb is to simply keep everything other than what I want to see develop way the heck away from the plants. This does mean some pretty scrupulous attention at the beginning of the growing season. The result of this is a clean and obvious growing medium, free of distractions for our intended harvest. The one great piece of news about all this is that, if one keeps things clean, weed-wise, there is far less worry about them as the year grinds on. Almost all weeds respond to this attention by essentially giving up. Where they can't reproduce, they won't be seen. It's when they reproduce that we really have trouble.