Moi has been walking more lately and she intends to build up her endurance. While walking, she notices that in some areas there are many plants many consider to be weeds. She thought about it and wondered if weeds were important.The Garden Organic blog posted the article, Benefits of Weeds in Farming Systems:
Organic farmers and growers should not be aiming to completely eradicate weeds from their fields and farms. Management rather than complete control is a more realistic and desirable goal. The word ‘management’ emphasises use of appropriate methods to maintain acceptable weed levels that take into account short-term economic and long-term ecological issues.
In spite of all the difficulties caused by weeds, they can offer some beneficial properties, particularly when occurring at low densities. These aspects should be utilised in the farming system, although this may make organic management more complicated than chemical based systems. Some of the potential benefits of weeds are listed below:
• helping to conserve soil moisture and prevent erosion. A ground cover of weeds will reduce the amount of bare soil exposed helping to conserve nutrients, particularly nitrogen which could otherwise be leached away, especially on light soils.
• food and shelter can be provided for natural enemies of pests and even alternative food sources for crop pests. The actual presence of weed cover may be a factor in increasing effectiveness of biological control of pests and reducing pest damage.
• weeds can also be valuable indicators of growing conditions in a field, for example of water levels, compaction and pH.
• weeds can be an important source of food for wildlife, especially birds. Bird populations have been declining on farmland over the last few decades and leaving weeds as a resource has been shown to help revive bird populations… http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/organicweeds/weed_information/weedtype.php?id=-2
Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ are plants considered to be weeds.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.
Doug Larson
A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.
Dogen
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.
James Russell Lowell
They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.
William Cowper
Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
William Beveridge
If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.
Luther Burbank
Violence is like a weed – it does not die even in the greatest drought.
Simon Wiesenthal
I didn’t want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.
Wynn Bullock
drwilda 
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