Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Gloria Baikauskas <gcb49@flash.net>]

I write about this all the time on various groups.  I experiment with weeds every season.  I find it is always true despite what we have been taught.  For instance, with strawberries....if I remove the weeds that surround them I have often lost them to insects, or disease.  The weeds seem to be taking care of them in some way.  Ditto with grapes.  The years I left them with weeds all around them they produced wonderful grapes with no disease, or insect problems.  If I weed the area, they suffer all season. 

 

I do tend to thin the weeds in my garden beds, but I always leave some.  When you properly experiment you must always have a control group, or area.  It is always interesting to see the differences between them.  The weeds have much deeper root systems so they should supply more moisture, but they also provide shade for the soil and the plants which helps more.  The moisture that comes from the soil itself every morning is more likely to stay in the soil because of them, even if the bed is not mulched.

 

Gloria, Texas

 

Three Feathers wrote: 

 

I  have a "real life" example of what this article mentioned and i hadn't thought about it until reading it----this summer, i had plans to pick the weeds out from around my plants/veggies, so they wouldn't be crowded out of water, space, etc.......but then it got so sweltering hot, i didn't finish my job---i just got lazy to be honest...that a/c felt just too nice 

However, the plants that i didn't "de-weed" fared much better through the summer, whereas the plants i de-weeded didn't do so well......after reading that article, i' can't help but think that the weeds left around plants were responsible for keeping moisture in the soil....it wasn't my green thumb at all  :-)

Guess that article serves as a reminder that we are all connected ---all Life on this planet is, for the  most part, interdependent upon each other for survival, in one way or another, whether we can see it or not......

I appreciate this article because it gives us an better understanding of a weed's role in the Circle of Life

a Marvelous Monday--
threefeathers