The weedy truth

Want to unplug? It  means unplugging from all sorts of things, including the agrochemical industry. That means no weed killer, not a  bad thing considering the junk that stuff may leave in the soil. Feel some permaculture coming on? Fair dinkum. Here's the space between the beans and the peas. Weedy as all getout. Now I could weed the area and clear it, but blank real estate just invites more weeds.

In organic growing you have to think differently.  You need to stop excluding the weeds from the garden in your thinking, because the weeds are  a part of the garden's ecosystem. Then you need to consider them as separate elements and consider what inputs and outputs they have. Well inputs are sunlight, space, water, nutrients and outputs are foliage, thorns, and seeds. Ive chosen to leave most of the weeds but pull the bindi because it's the one which spreads and has the output of thorns whereas the others don't. The other stuff actually has some useful outputs: it occupies real estate to muscle out the bindi, sucks sunlight to shade out any bindi which might  get in and actually provides some green manure for the soil when you uproot it and dig it in. In addition, funny enough I have been whinging about not having enough vegetative matter for my compost whilst whining about having too many weeds in the garden. A classic permaculture solution is to mate the two problems to gain a solution- foliage for the compost.

Of course this is not a perfect solution, the diabolical onion weed (boo, hiss) is still a problem but use of poisons (inputs: chemicals, industry, lots of energy, outputs: waste, money for fatcats, poisoned soil, interrupted eco systems) is just going to kill everything and leave the ground blank for more weeds to invade and, of course, necessitate more poison. Seems to be how it usually works with corporate agriculture, or corporate anything. Silly fatcats are too fat to get out into the garden and discover that nature is more interesting than money!