Keep it Light: It's the Weed Weediest Time of the Year (To the tune of the well-known Christmas song)

By Carl Little, NCAT Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Communities Program Manager

It’s that time of year again. It seems to happen overnight. One day your market garden is neat and pretty, with all the rows nicely cultivated and mulched, and the next day you can’t even see rows, let alone any of the vegetables. It appears that somebody has come in the night and planted a huge crop of weeds in your garden. Okay, maybe it wasn’t overnight. Maybe it was that week you took vacation or maybe it was all those evenings you took a bike ride, went for a walk, went fishing, or, heaven forbid, sat on the couch and watched television because it was, “just too hot outside” to do anything but sit and catch up on the reruns.

The truth is that the newness and excitement of the spring planting and watching those plants spring up from the ground has now worn off. It’s like your kids’ Christmas toys in February. It’s too new to be ignored, but old enough that you just don’t want to play with it every day. But wait, you just mentioned your kids. By now, the newness of those Christmas toys has really worn off and, face it, they’ve been pretty slothful this summer. It’s time to build some character in those budding couch potatoes.

Okay, so now you have weeds on the one hand and slothful kids on the other. This is a match made in paradise. Round ‘em up, hand them some gloves to protect their tender little non-working hands, and teach them what is a weed and what is not. The task is simple: pull up everything that is a weed and leave everything that is not. You don’t need to get overly complicated and teach them the scientific names of the weeds. Heck, you don’t even need to teach them the common names. Just say and do this, “Hey, [insert child’s name], this is a [insert crop name and point to it], this is not [point to weeds]. Pull up these [point to weeds] and not these [point to crop].” The redundancy of pointing is very important here. I recommend doing this at least three times. Repeat with other crops as necessary.

If you don’t have children, no problem. The world today, and especially the U.S., seems to be full of the non-working types. Just send a few inquiries out to your friends and neighbors and offer some character-building lessons. Parents love character building and a chance at the TV. You just might get a few of them to stay longer than 15 minutes. By the way, your success rate at keeping them working goes up exponentially with the amount of money and lemonade you offer. I usually judge how much to pay based on the coverage rate of a gallon of a non-sustainable alternative. But no matter how successful you are at having kids bail you out of your last week of goofing off instead of working the garden, remember this: every weed they pull is a weed you won’t have to pull.

A few caveats: Remember that lesson, “pull this and not that?” It seems a child’s attention span doesn’t allow them to learn this lesson until they “pull that and not this,” and then they must see you writhe in agony over the lost possibilities and the sweetest tomatoes that will now never be tasted. You have to be overly dramatic here in your grief over the lost plant—it’s the only way they will learn. The second thing you will lose is the produce itself, especially berries, and peas, and anything sweet. Kale, not so much. Just chalk this up to building a future market.

Note: The author of this article is the father of six children, all of them sons, except five.

See more at the author's blog on small scale intensive farming.