In the real world of this organic field, it’s not all close-up beauty shots of picture-perfect seedlings growing into pristine vegetables all in a row. Competition is the order of the day. Here, a couple of beet seedlings are surrounded by grass, dandelion, and round-leaf mallow (peeking out from behind the grass in the top right corner). It’s a motley assortment of weeds competing for water, food and even the sun (observe the grass shading out the baby beets). We call them weeds when we don’t want them to be there, yet they’re the ones perfectly suited to the conditions and able to grow fast. It can be a pitched battle when you’re not rooting for Nature to take its course!
So after you pull up those bad boys, what do you do to them? Can you compost them that small since there are no seeds yet?
Better late than never!: Weeding with a hoe, or scuffling with a 3-tine cultivator, or surgically hand-pulling tiny ones like around carrots and onions, you just leave em there, maybe they’ll return something to the soil. When hand-pulling much bigger weeds, I generally place them around the crop plants as I go, so they’ll dry into a mulch. Of course, you hopefully don’t let the weeds get to seeding stage. At that point, whatever they are, there’s a lot, so ideally, collect and compost. That’s what I’ve been doing, or trying to do and keep up!