The recent rainy weather has made weeds a priority chore in the garden.
I want to preface this article with the fact that unless you are going to grow all your food, there are no perfect choices, and we all have to make the best decisions for ourselves. But you can’t make those decisions without knowing how your food grows.
Also, I usually prioritize eating organic food. But I am not perfect.
And, I think eating vegetables is more important than not eating vegetables at all. I would rate conventionally grown frozen or canned vegetables over most of the rest of the food sold at the grocery store.
Weeds are wild plants growing where they are not wanted. These plants enjoy the conditions in the garden so much that they are prevalent even when we don’t cultivate them. They will take over if there is no effort to stop them.
We don’t want weeds in the garden because they compete with the plants that we do want to grow. They will fight for the resources that give the plants life, sunlight, water, and nutrients in the soil. They can stress out the plants by restricting their root zone, and this stress will attract pests and disease.
I feel that people need to know how food is grown, and therefore, a little knowledge of weed prevention is helpful even if you don’t grow food yourself.
In a conventional farm, there are a few ways to control weeds.
You can kill the weeds that are already there with a weed killer like Round-up or prevent new ones from growing by killing the weed seeds in the soil with a preemergent.
A preemergent is a type of herbicide that prevents weed seeds from germinating. A preemergent is considered safe and widely used in vegetable farms, but it is not allowed in certified organic fields. Once you apply it to the ground, you wait a couple of weeks, and then you can plant normally.
To kill existing plants that are already growing, conventional farms use the commonly known plant killer, Round-up. Since the plant dies, you don’t eat the chemicals, but in my opinion, the soil is affected and carrying the product in it.
One of the biggest problems, in my mind, with genetically modified corn is that farmers spray Round-up on the corn, but the corn doesn’t die. Then it comes to us in the food that we eat. The worst part is that we don’t recognize the corn in soda and processed food.
Either of these methods put chemicals in the soil that will make their way into things that grow in the ground that you treated.
I often like to think of growing a carrot. You put the carrot seed in the ground and give it water, nutrients, and sunlight, and the carrot grows. But the carrot doesn’t just appear out of thin air. As the seed becomes a carrot, it absorbs the water and nutrients and everything else that is in the soil and this becomes the carrot.
On an organic farm, there are three main ways to remove weeds.
We can prevent weeds from growing, by placing a plastic barrier on the ground so that the weeds that do germinate don’t get any sunlight and never grow to maturity. The plastic works well for some crops like tomatoes, where the plants grow about a foot apart. Plastic doesn’t work for vegetables like carrots, where each carrot is growing within a few inches of each other. And, the plastic is not reusable, and recycling is difficult because it is now you have the equivalent of a dirty plastic bag. And with each planting, the plastic must be replaced.
In places where the weather is hot, farms can harness the power of the sun by covering the row where food is to be grown next season with clear plastic, in a process called solarization. Solarization heats the ground, hot enough to kill the weed seeds. Solarization isn’t a perfect solution because it takes several weeks to work, and you can’t plant anything else in that location while it is working. You also have a plastic problem.
The most basic and demanding way to remove weeds is to pull them by hand or use a hoe. If done regularly before the plants create new seeds, many of them will go away over time. Unfortunately, this requires more labor than a commercial farm usually has available or can afford. But, for a home garden, it is very feasible to keep up with the weeds, and the more you weed, the easier is it in subsequent years. The fact that the growth subsides is one of the main advantages in “No-Till” farming, an old technique that is finding a resurgence in small farms.
Organic farms avoid the chemicals, but they have their challenges too. In a perfect world, we would pull all the weeds by hand. But the labor costs of your carrot would skyrocket.
How much do you want to pay for that carrot?