Weeding in the rain
Do you weed during rainy
days or stay inside where's it's dry? My answer depends on the season.
In March, no way am I weeding in rain that freezes my fingers and leaves
me shivering. But in April? When it's t-shirt weather and a gentle
shower makes dandelions pop out of the soil with a gentle tug? Sure,
I'll weed in the rain. Once your pants and shirt are fully soaked, you
don't even notice the water (and mud) anymore.
The real conundrum is
what to do with all that weedy biomass. I once read a novel that I was
thoroughly enjoying...until the author had her heroine weed the garden
and stuff the weeds into garbage bags to go out with the trash. I
stopped reading in horror. Sure, weeds have troubling seeds and the
perennials have roots that will start growing again under the right
conditions, but no way am I letting all that organic matter leave the
farm.
Lately, I've been dumping
weeds in big piles at the ends of perennial rows where a few
resprouting weeds won't present a problem. The weed piles rot down into
excellent soil that --- with a cardboard layer on top --- is perfect for
planting a new tree or bush into. I started one of this past fall's new high-density apple rows that way, and the trees seem to be thriving in the rich ground.
But I'm always looking for new weed solutions. What do you do with your weeds?
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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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The weeds we can eat often get incorporated into our meals, but when I don't have the time or inclination to sort weeds into different containers then they just go on the compost pile.
Most of our weeds are in the chicken-approved lists I can find online, so when we get chickens next year I'm guessing that the weeds will go to supplement the chickens' diets.
I feed them to my chickens. I've been weeding the herb bed a little every morning, and taking them to the chickens on the way to milk the goats.
Fern
We keep ours in a separate pile next to the good compost pile. Like you said, they rot down quite nicely, and then we know where to get our non-weed-free fill.
This time of year, the chickens don't seem to care for them once they've been pulled, unless there's a bug in the dirt that came with.