Weeds!

(CSA Newsletter: Week 32)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

Much of farming is trust: you put a seed (or plant) in the ground and have faith that it will indeed grow into a large delicious vegetable. Of course, if it were that simple, there’d be very little work involved. In reality, between the sowing and the harvesting, we farmers help our vegetables prosper by irrigating, protecting from insects or pests as necessary, and weeding.

Over the years, as we’ve worked on our own farm and others, we’ve come to highly value weeding. It’s a simple concept: remove the undesired, unintentional plants from around the desired ones and you increase their access to water, soil fertility, and sun. Even with all other factors being equal, a well weeded planting can thrive where another one withers in the shade of more vigorous wild plants.

As farmers, we employ many ‘technologies’ to free up the area around our vegetable plants. We have some ‘high tech’ solutions: such as our restored 1946 Allis Chalmers model G, a specialized cultivating tractor that we can outfit with any number of old and new cultivating implements. And, we also have some ‘low tech’ solutions: several kinds of hoes and even our own hands.

You’d think that with all the work we do to continually remove weeds, we would look upon any and all weeds with hate. But, what I can say? We became farmers because we love plants, and weeds are simply plants that we deem undesirable. Thus, even though we spend hundreds of hours removing weeds each season, we find ourselves fascinated by them too. Weeds come in so many different forms — about the only trait they all share is that they are usually vigorous and germinate readily once the conditions are right. The weeds probably rival the vegetables for diversity. We can identify them all by name, and because they each require slightly different conditions, we can often infer a lot of information about the soil conditions in the spots they happen to grow. Really, they’re endlessly interesting for us to study, talk about, and read about. In case you don’t believe us, here is an introduction to a few of the more common weeds that grow on our farm:

Hairy nightshade (Solanum sarrachoides) is probably our most common summer weed. It is a distant relative of tomatoes and produces tiny little green fruit that eventually ripen to a dark blue black. Fairly easy to remove, but it isn’t uncommon for a plant or two to outwit us so we find a giant plant loaded with ripe fruit at the end of the season. Fortunately, Hairy Nightshade is a summer only weed, so we know that what’s left in the field will die at first frost — we just have to avoid letting them set fruit that ripens.

Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium L.) is another summer weed in the nightshade family. You may seen a very similar plant in cultivated gardens under the name ‘Trumpet Flower.’ When left in the field and given adequate water and heat, Jimsonweed will grow into a small tree by the end of the summer, covered first with beautiful haunting white flowers followed by walnut-sized spiny green seed pods. Every part of the plant is highly toxic (and reputedly hallucinogenic), and the plants exude an incredibly strong scent that we can smell whenever we hoe them out or simply brush them with our shoes while walking down a path.

Curly dock (Rumex crispus L.) is a winter-hardy weed. Although they primarily germinate in the summer, the large leafy plants will grow all winter and finally send up profuse seed heads in the spring. Once established, each individual dock plant is very challenging to remove except through major tractor work, because they grow a thick, long yellow-white root that can extend several feet into the ground (much like a large parsnip). Apparently those long tap roots are highly nutritious, because an herbalist friend regularly harvests our dock roots for use in an iron tonic (along with a few other weeds from our farm, such as dandelion roots).

Persian speedwell (Veronica persica Poir.) is probably one of our most aesthetically pleasing weeds, which should not be a surprise given that it was introduced to North America as an ornamental ground cover. It grows especially well in the winter and is one of our most common cold season weeds. The delicate green curly leaves sprawl out across the ground and are covered with tiny white and blue blossoms from January through March. Although its prostrate growing habits make it difficult to remove from cold, wet winter ground, the wild pollinators love it. On warm late winter days, the speedwell will be buzzing with activity as bees fly from flower to flower.

Common groundsel (Senecio vulgaris L.) on the other hand is probably one of the ugliest weeds on our farm. It too grows during the winter months, particularly during the late winter and early spring. Groundsel is a short growing green plant with flowers that resemble tiny yellow dandelions. Unfortunately, the resulting ‘look’ of the plant is messy and trashy. Amazingly, it seems to be capable of germinating and setting seed in practically a matter of minutes, but perhaps we just pay less attention in late winter.

Miner’s lettuce (Montia perfoliata) is by far the tastiest weed on our farm — yes, tastiest. Miner’s lettuce grows in a few spots on our field (as well as in shady forests), and we love to harvest it in early spring when it is hands-down the sweetest, most tender green on our farm. The succulent yellow-green leaves grow in a unique rosette shape and slowly extend from the base as the plant flowers. We pick them when they are young and make salads that feature a unique lemony flavor. Delicious!

Lambsquarters (Chenopodium berlandieri Moq.) is another very common summer weed for us and also another tasty edible. We’re less inclined to stop and harvest Lambsquarters to eat, but the leaves are delicious when very young. It’s sometimes hard to find young Lambsquarter, however, because like many weeds it can grow from a tiny sprout to a fully flowered 6 foot tall plant in seemingly a matter of moments. Fortunately, this is another plant that dies when cold weather arrives.

Spiny sowthistle (Sonchus asper) is possibly one of the only weeds we truly detest. It grows readily most of the summer, and as it grows tall into a flowering plant it exudes a black sap-like substances that is itchy. The seed heads are also quite messy, often dropping all over other crops, especially (for some reason) our tomatoes. Thistles are probably sharper, but this plant is more overall aggravating.

Annual ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum)s the weed that has probably done the most damage to our crops over the years. The farmer before us grew ryegrass for seed, and so we have quite a seed ‘bank’ of it in our soil. Every spring and fall, the seeds on the surface germinate in the mild wet weather and carpet our beds with green shoots. If it isn’t all removed, the ryegrass will grow thick and tall around our crops, starving them of light and water. We now realize that we must remove all the ryegrass immediately, but in our first few busy years, we routinely let some of the grass grow up and set seed. Consequently, we’ve probably added to our ryegrass seed bank in recent years, but we’re actively working to fix the situation and are hopeful that future spring and fall seasons won’t be dominated an unintentional green carpet.

So, those are a few that illustrate how interesting this broad category of plants can be, but we have many, many more on our farm. To name just a few more: purslane, purple deadnettle, redroot pigweed, bindweed, knapweed, Canada thistle, reed canarygrass (at the edge of our field), “Pineapple” weed, and more. Some of the weeds we remove were actually unintentionally introduced by us — we once let a bed of mustards go to seed, and now every year we have some ‘volunteer’ mustard greens in that spot!

I suppose that if we didn’t love plants, removing weeds would be just simply a heinous chore. And, to be honest, sometimes it still is. But as you can see, weeds are actually quite interesting plants — just as interesting as vegetables, albeit less useful to us for the most part.

Of course, we can’t let pretty weeds (such as Persian Speedwell) or tasty weeds (such as Miner’s Lettuce) trick us into ignoring them, because ultimately we are in the business of growing big vigorous tasty vegetables to eat. And, apparently we’re keeping up on our weeding chores this summer, because we have as many big vigorous tasty vegetables as ever before. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla