Gardening Guide: Weeds Are Your Friend

Most gardeners hate weeds. For many gardeners weeds are a pest that must be eradicated at all cost. Most gardeners spend way more time then they would like to pull and kill weeds. It would surprise most gardeners that weeds are not your enemy but can and should be your friend. When the conquistadors first arrived in the new world one of the first things they did was stop the natives from growing weeds with their crops. Little did they know that the Native Americans actually knew more then the Spanish did about growing crops. With the right knowledge and use weeds can actually help improve your gardens production in a number of ways. This article will tell you how weeds can actually be used to improve your garden.

The first way that weed can help you grow better is by using them to tell you what is wrong with the health of your soil. Having a certain weed means that the soil has a certain problem. One kind of weed may mean that you need more nitrogen and you can fix that by adding nitrogen fixing plants to the soil. The only problem with this is if you know enough to identify the various weeds and then know what it means for your soil you probably don't really need this article. It is worth knowing about this but the only way to make this usefull is to research and learn what weeds you have and then learn what that means to you.

Weeds actually help in other ways besides telling you what is wrong with your soil. One way weeds can help plants is by growing deep into the ground and bringing up hard to get nutrients. these nutrients then can be used by your plants. In fact weeds help bring bad soil back to life. Leaving weeds alone for one or two seasons is all you need to bring the soil back to life. In nature you might notice that some spots have a particular weed but others do not. Believe it or not the weeds are growing in areas that need them. Some weeds have seeds that can grow quickly or that can stay dormant for years. These seeds will not grow when conditions are perfect for growth but lay dormant until conditions are not good and the weed is needed to bring back the health of the soil.

Another way that weeds help is they open new areas of soil. Some kinds of plants and weeds work together. For instance a tomato might piggyback on the roots of a weed. The truth is it is not your plants that are being hurt by the weed but the weed that is being hurt by the plants you grow. In a healthy soil regular plants will overtake the weeds and should not have any problem with them. Unfortunately most people do not have soil that is as healthy as they might think. Proper management of soil like the Native Americans used to do requires weeds.

Weeds can also help in other ways. Weeds can attract a pest instead of the pest coming to your good plant. Some weeds repel pests which repels them from your plants too.

Obviously it would look ugly to have certain kinds of weeds all over. So for a backyard gardener you can keep weeds from getting to close to your plants. You can pull some weeds but not eliminate all the weeds. You can pull weeds when they get to tall. You can get rid of weeds that are a nuisance. You can leave the root alone on weeds but cut the plant part as they come up.

With proper care weeds can actually benefit your garden. In nature weeds are a natural part of the cycle of life and are there to fix problems in the soil. To have a healthy garden you should use weeds the way that nature intended them to be used. There is a reason that weeds are so numerous and always bothering you and that is because they are natures way of fixing what you are doing wrong.