"Why mulch the garden now?" Daddy asked when he was visiting in October.  "Weeds aren't going to grow this late in the season."  It turns out that weeds were growing, and if I'd had my act together, it would have been smarter to get the garden mulched down by the end of September when a lot of the winter weeds germinated.  Your garden may have different trouble plants, but these are our three most common winter weeds.

Common Chickweed (Stellaria media) loves bare, disturbed ground and will quickly spread its runner-like stems across your garden.  Identify this alien species by the rosette form of its growth, by the small, roundish leaves, and the tiny white flowers.  Although chickweed is a pain in the butt to hack out of half-frozen ground when you want to plant your early spring crops, if you do let the chickweed get ahead of you at least you'll know that the chickweed greens are beloved by your flock of chickens.  In fact, I've read that common chickweed is often eaten by humans either in salad or as a cooked green.

Purple Dead Nettle (Lamium purpureum) is easy to identify when it blooms in the early spring --- the top few leaves turn purplish to set off the pink flowers, and the square stem proclaims it to be a member of the mint family.  At this time of year, the non-stinging dead nettle takes a bit more care to identify, but once you feel the fuzzy leaves, you'll realize few other wild plants have the same gestalt.  Like nearly all of our garden weeds, Purple Dead Nettle hails from Europe, probably introduced for the edible young leaves that can be eaten like chickweed.  Although Purple Dead Nettle does like to fill up the winter garden, the flip side of the coin is that it will bloom even in the winter if the weather is mild, providing food for honeybees during warm days. 

Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) always cheers me up since it's the first flower I see most years, blooming as early as February or March.  Although the bittercress grows its leaves in a rosette, they are very different from chickweed, never taking on the sprawling appearance and usually reaching only two or three inches in diameter.  Like the other weeds, Hairy Bittercress is from Europe and is considered to be edible.

As I read all of the benefits of our three "worst" winter weeds, I nearly talk myself into leaving the ground unmulched.  But I know that all three of these guys will quickly go to seed and overrun the garden, a no-no when running a no-till operation.  Next year I hope to mulch earlier before the seeds germinate.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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