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(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.)

Most of your weeds will be annuals which must grow from seed each year and tend to be easy to deal with. My handful of “good weeds” grow large, are easy to pull up even when mature, and remain supple without getting too fibrous or woody making them excellent composting plants. An example is the perilla seen in Photo 5. This is my best composting weed so I let them get large (36”) as long as they’re not obstructing any crop plants. Others in this same category are most of the tender spring weeds which remain soft and never get very large such as henbit and chickweed, and are easy to pull up.

One critical reason to get to know your weeds is that some of them are toxic to certain animals including humans. The perilla I just mentioned can be fatally toxic to cattle, horses, and goats among others depending on the stage of the plant, so this is a topic worthy of research for those with animals. Other weeds such as the poison ivy I deal with every year have toxin properties which are not fatal but can cause severe skin and other bad reactions in some people. Do an internet search on poisonous plants in your area to find out which weeds to be wary of.

Other good weeds to be looking for are the edible and medicinal weeds. Many edible weeds taste like weeds (or worse) but some such as lambs quarter (Photo 6) are closely related to spinach and quinoa (all three in a group called chenopodiums) and for some of us they taste better than spinach. It’s so tasty I did selections over a three-year period to select for huge plants which were heavy seed producers. Do an internet search for medicinal plants in your area and you’ll find that some of them will be growing in your garden. Mullein and plantain are two of the more common medicinal weeds in my garden.

A few weeds will be perennials that come back from the roots even though you thought you removed them. These tend to be much more difficult to manage due to their strong root systems and some are prolific seed producers as well.

My worst emergency weed, nearly impossible to eradicate, is a perennial called buttonweed (Diodia virginiana, Photo 7). It’s very soft and supple, almost succulent, and makes good compost in its early stages. It goes into the compost pile as long as there are no seeds or flowers, then to the burn pile once they get to that stage.

My second worst weed is a legume called lespedeza. The gnarly roots are extremely difficult to pull up making the plant nearly impossible to eradicate. When I first fenced off my garden, one corner was full of lespedeza. My only chemical-free option was to mow the area as short as I could, then put down old tarps covered with mulch. I planted squash in that area using individual grow boxes on top of the mulch. Two years later when I pulled up the tarps, the lespedeza was gone. Sometimes you have to go to these extremes to eradicate the worst weeds.

The last perennial I deal with is Johnson grass and its relatives. This is a very large bunchgrass and is difficult to mow and eradicate along fence lines. In the garden I use a shovel to dig it up and flip it over so the roots can dry out, returning later to shake off the dry soil before consigning them to the compost pile. Knowing which weeds can be pulled and which need a shovel can help eradicate perennial weeds much more quickly.

Get to know your weeds and be able to identify the perennials from the annuals.

Weed Seeds in the Compost Pile

Another aspect of getting to know your weeds is learning which ones to keep out of the compost pile. One of my most common weeds is a species of wild onion. I’ve tried cooking them all sorts of ways, even using the tender green shoots as chives, but they are so tough and stringy they have no use that I can discover. They multiply like crazy so when weeding, I begin by pulling all the wild onions and tossing them into the burn pile, then I pull the other weeds.

Conventional wisdom says not to put weeds into the compost pile which have gone to seed. “One year’s seeds equals seven year’s weeds,” is a nifty little rhyme but not especially useful for me personally. Weeds are ubiquitous and eternal so I ignore this advice for most annual weeds. There are so many other sources of weed seeds that I get more benefit from the compost than detriment from their seeds. Once the compost is tilled into the soil two years after the weeds were put into the compost pile, some of the seeds are no longer viable and after tilling, the percentage of seeds close enough to the surface to germinate is not enough for me personally to worry about. YMMV.

If you’re a normal gardener and don’t want weed seeds in your compost pile, learn when they go to seed so they can be pulled before that time. Many plants are day-length sensitive so will form seeds more or less the same week each year, letting you know to weed before then. One weed I don’t let go to seed I call Princess Anne (smaller relative of Queen Anne’s lace). The seeds annoyingly stick to my weeding gloves, pants and everything else.

One last thought on weeds in the compost pile. Since my area gets enough rain to keep the compost pile moist year round, some weeds continue growing after being tossed onto the pile. Perennials with runners or large root systems are especially prone to this. Perennial mints often have lots of runners so I let them dry down before adding to the pile. Some weeds have lot of soil sticking to the roots which is difficult to remove, but remember, all soil which goes to the compost pile will be returned to the garden when the composting cycle is over.

TOOLS FOR THE WAR ON WEEDS

Diamond Hoe – Also known as a scuffle hoe. I mentioned in another article on gardening that this is the single-most important tool in my weeding arsenal because it cuts way down on the amount of time it takes to weed. While a normal hoe must be raised into the air and then lowered again to get a single chop on weeds, a diamond hoe blade remains in constant contact with the soil so it’s more like scrubbing a floor with a mop. The hoe cuts weeds on both the push and the pull stroke so it’s very quick compared to a conventional hoe. The diamond-shaped head has points at the 3, 6, 9, and 12 o’clock positions. The longer right and left points allow you to slow down around the stems of your crops and very delicately hoe the weeds which you could never get with a conventional hoe, leaving less hand weeding afterwards. I got mine from Homestead Iron, a blacksmith who makes them right here in the U.S.A. and sells them at the Mother Earth News festivals and on his website, where he indicates they’re only for small weeds. This is not true. Depending on the species, I can cut some pretty large weeds on the pull stroke. I use mine all season long: like a mop in the spring, then with just the pull stroke later in the season on larger weeds. I highly recommend this tool, also available at other locations in slightly different variations, quality, and durability. The Homestead Iron hoe is also well worth the price because of the way the way the head is attached to the handle. We’ve all had rakes and hoes separate from the handle because they were pushed into a small thin tube with a bolt or rivet holding the head on, which eventually gives way. With Homestead Iron tools, the metal collar and heads are a single piece, attached to the hickory handle in such a way they should last for decades.

Leaf Rake – I was late to the party discovering leaf rakes as a garden tool. While growing up we only ever used a rock rake (which we always called a garden rake) in the garden. The trouble is, rock rakes also rake up a lot of soil with the hoed weeds. A leaf rake works much better for raking those finer weeds after they’ve ben hoed and can be turned so only a few tines are pointing down to get into the tighter areas. I’m now hunting at auctions for a narrower leaf rake with only five or six tines across. The cultivator I bought at my local hardware store also works for raking larger weeds.

Shovel – I’ve already mentioned a shovel for those really large-rooted perennial weeds, especially bunch grasses. Don’t procrastinate, dig them up as soon as you realize what they are before they get any bigger with a more extensive root system. For a hand shovel, nothing beats the rock-solid soil knife made by A.M. Leonard Company. It’s actually a small hand spade with the edges semi-sharpened. The stainless steel blade is very thick and durable, good for hand digging small tough perennial weeds and bunch grasses without bending.

Hand Hoe – I have a triangle hand hoe (Photo 8) which I find indispensible in gardening and I probably use it for more jobs than all my other tools. The point is perfect for digging planting holes and furrows and when turned on edge, makes a good weeder for smaller or tighter areas. In Photo 9 you can see how I use this hoe for delicate weeding before putting mulch down on my cucumber rows. The top half of the photo is before weeding, the bottom after.

Tarp – A wheelbarrow or hand cart is the best way to get many weeds to the compost pile. An old tarp works wonders as well. I get tarps free from the hardware store which they take off bundles of lumber. Imagine trying to move enough leaves to mulch a large garden using a wheelbarrow. Since leaves are very bulky but lightweight, now imagine piling them all onto a tarp and dragging it over to the garden or compost pile. You can move a lot of leaves in a hurry. When getting leaves from my neighbors, I collect them on the tarp, then hoist the tarp up into the bed of my pickup to offload the leaves. The same principle works well for mulch-bound grass clippings which I let dry out for a few hours or overnight to make them lighter and easier to rake and move on the tarp.

CONCLUSION

I hope by now you’ve gained an appreciation of the importance of understanding your weeds before TEOTWAWKI Day One. Like gardening and composting, it’s a steep learning curve and you’ll have more failures than successes in the very beginning, but don’t give up. Failures are okay while supply chains are still keeping grocery shelves full but when the SHTF, these things will be critical knowledge that can make the difference between surviving and starving.

Imagine the amount of manual labor each of us will be doing in a grid-down world. Most of our non-sleeping hours will be filled with chores. Many survivors will spend way too much time weeding which could have been avoided had they gained some knowledge ahead of time. Weeding will be a vital task in that world where we must produce all our own food once the freeze-dried stroganoff runs out. The more efficiently we can be about weeding the more time we’ll have for firing up the generator and watching those Saturday-night Gilligan’s Island DVDs. Not only will knowing our weeds be important for proper management, but how to minimize them in the first place using various mulches.

[Disclosure notice: I receive no compensation for books and products mentioned in this article.]

We see it all the time: photos of blue-ribbon gardens with beautiful flowers and mouth-watering tomatoes, beans and squash. Everything is neat and tidy, well groomed, and not a weed in sight. People get all excited, visions of seed-catalog covers dancing in their heads, and decide they just have to start a garden so they too can have some of that fresh produce and flowers. A month later their garden more closely resembles an advertisement for Round-Up than anything they may have seen on the cover of Organic Gardening. How, oh how, do we make our gardens look like the one on the seed-catalog cover?

In T.J. Dixon’s recent article Survival Gardening: The Most Vital Prep and J.M.’s recent Black Gold: Organic Matter, both pointed out the oft-repeated advice that you’re not going to open up that can of survival seeds on Day One of TEOTWAWKI and be able to be a successful gardener without previous experience, even with Gardening for Dummies to guide you along the way. This is probably the single-most important piece of gardening advice those preparing for TEOTWAWKI can internalize: only with lots of previous experience can you harvest enough calories to get you through Phase One of bad times.

I couldn’t agree more with these two well-written articles on Gardening and Composting, and I’d like to add a third skill to be perfecting right now: Weeding. I know, it seems like anyone with the IQ of cat food can go out and pull weeds but I hope by the end of this article you’ll see that’s not the case. I also hope you can add intelligent weeding to the other items on your list of preps to start living now.

OVERCOMING ANTI-WEEDING SENTIMENTS

The main problems with pulling weeds for most people are the sheer monotony, the physical effort, and the thought that we could be doing something way more productive with our time like organizing our sock drawer. Just the word “weed” (not that kind!) brings negative feelings to anyone who’s tried gardening, from the newbie to the old hand.

To help overcome these negative feelings which prevent us from managing weeds more intelligently, I offer the following ideas which I incorporate into my own gardening and composting programs.

Attitude

Attitude is important in most things in life and weeding is no exception. I try to remain positive by thinking of the benefits of weeds. I’m not pulling weeds, I’m harvesting compost. I’m not cutting the lawn and pasture, I’m making mulch for the garden. Both compost and mulch are indispensible to gardening so these are both very positive aspects of weeds for me.

Another plus for me is that weeding is a time to be alone with my thoughts, philosophizing as I pull weeds while pondering life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I get to be Plato in the pea patch. While weeding, I’ve written many poems, parodies, and SB articles in my head, and had solutions to come to me for problems which were ruminating in the back of my mind, waiting for just the right moment to come to the surface in that “aha!” moment.

Prevention: Mulches

The first step to winning the war on weeds is to prevent them in the first place. The single-best way to prevent weeds is with mulches. From my perspective, gardening wouldn’t even be possible without mulches.

Mulch is anything which covers the soil around garden plants. Mulches include such things as tree leaves, sawdust, hay/straw, plastic sheeting, commercial weed barriers, etc. Since I’m frugal and enjoy repurposing, one of my “super mulches” is old blankets and area rugs from estate auctions and thrift stores. The rugs in Photo 1 set me back $2 for the lot.

After positioning them in the garden, they’re hidden under leaves or other more attractive mulches. They last for years and allow water to pass through while preventing weeds from coming through as they germinate. These work especially well in areas such as my tall A-frame bean trellis which is difficult to get underneath for weeding (Photo 2). With these long-lasting types of mulches it’s important to pull them up at the beginning of each season to detach them from the ground, then put them back down and reapply the “pretty” mulch on top.

Some mulches can be put down long before planting, others right before planting, and yet others once the young plants have grown some. Only experience will tell you which plants need what.

I have access to plenty of oak and hickory leaves so I get a head start on spring by putting them in the garden as fast as I can rake them in the fall. One lesson I learned early on is that, unfortunately, the mulch does an excellent job of keeping the ground cold long after it should have warmed up from the sun. As I moved aside oak leaves to plant my potatoes in March, much to my dismay I discovered the ground was still very cold compared to bare soil. I planted anyway and even after removing some mulch so the sun could heat the soil, the crop fell behind and I lost all I had hoped to gain by mulching ahead of time. For other crops such as tomatoes and peppers planted in May, the ground was plenty warm underneath the mulch by then. Again, only this kind of experience can help you do what’s best for your own garden. In a grid-down world, losing a month’s worth of growth on potatoes would be catastrophic considering it’s one of the most productive calorie-producing plants in the entire garden.

Oak/hickory leaves are my most common mulch and I like them for several reasons. They last a long time, they’re the easiest mulch for me to get in large quantities, and by the end of the growing season the bottom layer has turned to humus and the middle layers are beginning to break down. Another benefit of thick leaf mulches is when used with sweet potatoes, small bunches of sweet potatoes form along the vines underneath the leaves but above the soil. I grate these carrot-sized ones and freeze them in 1-lb. bags to use in my chili recipe. Oak leaves are now the only compost I use with sweet potatoes. Photo 3 shows them with tomatoes.

Another favorite mulch is old sawdust from a local sawmill. It’s the color and texture of coffee grounds but hasn’t composted much due to lack of nitrogen (Photo 4). I use this strictly on top of the soil as mulch, never tilled in or it steals nitrogen from plants. As time passes, the layer in contact with the soil breaks down into fine compost and improves the soil. Each spring, I rake it up to move any weed seeds which may have blown on top of it during the growing season lower into the pile, then rake it all back in place, leaving fewer seeds on top. My peanut crop this year is planted in one such area and the only weeds I’ve dealt with so far are a few buckwheats from last year’s experimental crop, and the ever-present morning glories which can probably grow up through concrete if my experience is any indication. Both of these weeds make good compost and are easy to pull up.

What I like about grass clippings is that they tend to mat down around plants to form a tighter weed barrier and can be collected all summer long for touch-up mulching where needed.

Once you start using various mulches you’ll get to know what works and what doesn’t, experience best gained sooner than later. I used box elder leaves once and discovered they break down so quickly they’re gone by midsummer. Now they go directly to the compost pile.

Aside from weed control, mulches do wonders for conserving water in the soil. Even in my region of the country where we get lots of precipitation, July tends to be rainless so mulches greatly decrease the need for hand watering.

So, start getting this mulching experience now so you’ll know what’s workable in your particular garden, instead of beginning your learning curve on TEOTWAWKI Day One along with 613 other survival skills competing for your time. In many cases it’s difficult or impractical to live our preps but for most of us, learning to garden, compost, and weed is very doable right now.

KNOW YOUR WEEDS

A topic I don’t hear discussed much but which I think is important for both weed management and composting is to know your weeds. You don’t need to learn the scientific genus and species names, or even the common names (although they can help when trouble-shooting with other gardeners) but once you begin gardening and composting, you’ll want to start getting an understanding the various characteristics of each kind of weed you have. You’ll soon discover that all weeds are not created equal. Some are the equivalent of serial killers while others have merely rolled through a stop sign at 2:00 AM in the middle of nowhere when no one was coming. A few of my weeds are “emergency weeds” when I see them poking up through the mulch but most can go on the garden to-do list. A few of mine are “good weeds” which I let grow as long as long as they’re not obstructing sunlight or crowding out my crops.

(To be concluded tomorrow, in Part 2.)