Weeds And Weeding - Gardening

Where do all the weeds come from? Why is it weeds grow better than cultivated plants? What can I do to get rid of all these weeds? These are questions asked daily by home gardeners from early spring until late fall.

Weeds become an obsession with some gardeners, increasing to a point where the pleasure of gardening is lost. Rarely do we hear a gardener mention how weeds protect the soil from damage, how the deep-rooting kinds bring nutrients from the subsoil to the upper soil for our plants to use, or the benefit of spreading forms which keep moisture near the surface and prevent clay soils from baking in summer heat.

What exactly is a weed? It is any plant the gardener does not wish to have growing in the garden. In some instances the term is applied to hardy native plants which have the ability to survive adverse conditions in an area to which they are indigenous. Few native plants are classed as weeds. Most are introduced.

Improved by cultivation and selection, many of the plants we despise when found in our gardens are basic food crops in other countries: dandelion, burdock, nettles, bracken fern fiddles, chickweed, to name a few. If some gigantic disaster should destroy our cultivated food plants, our mental approach to weeds that survived would quickly change.

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