permaculture

[Mark <mpludwig@facstaff.wisc.edu>]

At 10:13 AM 9/11/02 -0700, you wrote:
> Yea, I keep hearing this "wrong plant in the wrong place" stuff.  I also 
> think  that Mother Nature isn't all that stupid: those plants are EXACTLY 
> in the right place from an ecological point of view.  It just doesn't 
> suit  our purposes, so we continue to force our way until eventually the 
> soil just gives out.  "Weeds" are great soil builders, usually 
> replenishing the soil with exactly the nutrients that ahave been depleted. 
> So what then is the point in eradicating these weeds? We should have a 
> category on "weeds" in the database, together with all the useful 
> information we know about them...
> Heide

Just think of tillage, grazing and mowing as shredding and incorporation of 
weed biomass.  Limit your other control methods (fire and poison) to the 
minimum and be lazy enough to maintain the weed seed bank and don't loose 
much sleep worrying about weeds.


Mark P. Ludwig
Poultry Research Lab
University of Wisconsin -Madison
608-262-1730 WK
608-846-7125 HM