What's the best thing to do with weeds I've pulled up?

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by sun burn, Jul 2, 2010.

  1. sun burn

    sun burn Junior Member

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    I've got a lot of weeding to do here as I am cleaning up our property. I've been burning them but wonder now if i should be doing something else? Such as putting htem on the compost, or giving them to the ducks and later the chickens as well.

    The main weeds are prickels/sensitive weed
    a tall burry thing (I don't know the name)
    and other softer type plants.

    Do ducks and chickens actually like weeds? or do they just pick off the insects?
     
  2. Grahame

    Grahame Senior Member

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    Can you get a pig to clear them for you? - value add to the weeds. Please try to think of them as a resource you need to find a use for, rather than something you just waste by burning.

    The poultry loves weeds, and even the ones they don't eat, they will scratch up and turn into compost - especially if you have a good deep litter yard for them. I don't think you can have any such thing as a weed if you have poultry - if you have chickens then weeds can be considered food.
     
  3. Michaelangelica

    Michaelangelica Junior Member

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    Nearly always weeds survive better than most plants because of their high medicinal properties.
    Many medicines we get from plants start their life as protective compounds for the plant.
    Weeds do well because they have a lot of 'protective compounds"

    At the very least, weeds should be welcomed for the extra compost/mulch 'fertiliser' they give to soil after you pull them up.

    Solaraziation with sheets of clear plastic, or no dig gardens (use v. thick layers of paper) are two ways of controlling them quickly. There are many others;
    just changing the soil pH can upset a lot.
    Mimosa can be a problem in tropical areas because of the huge amount of seed it produces; seed that remains viable in the soil for years.
     
  4. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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    G'day sun burn

    Eat them. Failing that, feed them to something else, and eat that/them.

    Compost them (if they are not diseased, or full of invasive sp. seeds), aerobic as opposed to anaerobic (to reduce GHG emissions), or make 'compost soup'.

    If you must resort to burning them, at least try to find a use for the resultant resource - ash.

    Whatever you do with them, try to get their 'elements' back into the 'loop' that you are planning/designing/building.

    Save your own energy, and get your livestock to do your weeding for you - see: chicken/pig/goat 'tractor'.

    Think like Grahame et al - think 'circle' - everything that goes around, must come around. The more things in your 'circle', the less wasted energy, the greater the sustainability of your project.

    Use the 'search' facility - heaps of info on here.

    Cheerio, Marko.
     
  5. purplepear

    purplepear Junior Member

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    Dear sunburn - please tell us you have stopped burning and are now seeing the marvelous resource you have in biomass. Be quick as I will hold my breath till you do ...........queek
     
  6. cooloola

    cooloola Junior Member

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    Doing landcare work we would put then in large black garbage bags and leave in the sun for a few weeks to sterilize and kill any seeds,
    then compost
     
  7. scottjunner

    scottjunner Junior Member

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    Make sludge

    with the ones that will grow if they so much as touch the ground once more, let them rot in a drum of water and use that as liquid fertilizer. The seeds will rot too.
     
  8. Michaelangelica

    Michaelangelica Junior Member

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    How is that working for you PP?
    LOL!

    A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.

    ~ Doug Larson.

    But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else.
    In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit.
    Weeds are people's idea, not nature's.

    ~ Author Unknown.

    I always think of my sins when I weed.
    They grow apace in the same way and
    are harder still to get rid of.

    ~ Helena Rutherfurd Ely, A Woman's Hardy Garden, 1903. (LOL)

    But make no mistake: the weeds will win; nature bats last.
    ~ Robert M. Pyle.


    I learn more about God
    From weeds than from roses;
    Resilience springing
    Through the smallest chink of hope
    In the absolute of concrete....

    ~Phillip Pulfrey, "Weeds," Perspectives, www.originals.net

    One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.
    ~John Burroughs, Pepacton, 1881

    This is my favorite
    What is a weed?
    A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

    ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878
    and
    [​IMG]
    seems to me that the problem is us, not knowing enough about the uses and virtues of the weed
     
  9. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

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    He can't reply right now MA - he face went blue and he passed out. Thankfully that's when he started breathing again...
     
  10. Michaelangelica

    Michaelangelica Junior Member

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  11. sun burn

    sun burn Junior Member

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    Oh wonderful thank you so much for all your ideas. Here's an attempt to answer you all.

    Pigs. We have wild pigs nearby who sometimes come trotting through my garden but I would rather they didn't do that. I only have one hectare. And i don't want the pigs upsetting anybody else here. I can't get a pet pig though I have had one before and think they are lovely.

    Goats. I don't want to keep a goat tethered its whole life but that would be what i'd have to do if i were to get one. I would love a goat though.

    I shall try the following - ducks and chickens to chew on them. The mud sludge, the liquid fertiliser. I'm a bit wary about the compost solution unless I make a weed only compost which could be a good first solution for me actually. I don't want to mix the weeds with my other compost as its mostly lettuce, breaking down veyr quickly and I need to use it quickly as i have an urgent need of compost.

    Burning, if i continue to do it at all, i will use the ash in my compost and on my garden. We have a lot of palm fronds. These have to be dealt with by burning i think as they are unbelievably numerous. Ideally i would have a good mulching machine for them but i can't afford the sort that works. We also have a lot of wood rubbish. Our garden has been neglected for 20 years and so it is chock full of rubbish (i know most of you will object to that word)

    Yes I think i will start a dedicated weed compost pile. made of weeds, manure, lime, soil and maybe leaves too. What else should I put in? You see I am worried about the seeds. I would have to think more about hte plastic bag sunburn solution. I need something fairly easy to do as I have so much work to do here. I tend not to weed large amounts at once. Its a job i like to do when I am too tired to do other things.

    Anyway i am so glad for your replies and i am sure I will be returning to this thread for reminders and more things to try down the track but for now its the dedicated compost weed pile. Yay!
     
  12. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    I'd also suggest finding what the weeds actually are. Some weeds are beneficial and it doesn't matter if they reseed into the garden. You can either eat them or pull them up and put them straight back on the soil as mulch.

    Are you mulching in general?
     
  13. sun burn

    sun burn Junior Member

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    I will be mulching my vegetable patch. I have to go and buy a hay bale. Normally i let the leaves stay where they fall. I will mulch when its necessary and when I have it. I haven't got money to buy mulch beyond the vege patch and probably also some fruit trees. Basically i want to plant trees and plants that don't need too much attention.

    I don't think any of these weeds are edible. Also I forgot to add long grass to the weed list. I don't like hte look of these particular weeds. There is one "weed' that i really like. It is dark red and has little white balls on it. So i let them carry on and i have just made a bed of them outside my chicken house. I don't really want dead weeds lying all over the place. Our place is a garden not a patch of wild bush, except for the bottom part of the block where i planted rainforest trees some years ago. I haven't got time to do much down there so whatever happens happens. Although there have been periods down there where I have tried to eradicate the long grass.
     
  14. Adam

    Adam Junior Member

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    The palm fronds will work fine as a mulch without being shredded. They might not be practical for the vegetable garden, but you could at least use them around the fruit trees or spread them out under your rainforest trees. You could always use a machete or something to chop them up into more managable pieces if they are really huge. The weeds will work fine as a mulch too if they haven't gone to seed yet. It just seems rather strange to me to burn perfectly good mulch and then go out and spend money to buy straw bales.
     
  15. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    Location:
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    There's other free things you can use for mulch too, especially if you have a car and trailer.

    If you are buying in mulch I think you need straw not hay. Won't hay have weeds and seeds in it?
     
  16. sun burn

    sun burn Junior Member

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    Adam whatever I buy would not be replacing palm fronds. There's no way I would put palm fronds on my vegetable patch (Would you?).

    As to Pebbles suggestion. What are these free things you suggest? re Hay/ straw, it probably is straw. I am not sure.
     
  17. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    Location:
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    I don't know what's in your neighbourhood, but where I live I've used weeds, seaweed, grass clippings, leaves (green or dried or leaf mould), light prunings, newspaper, cardboard etc.

    The list of what's available is much longer though. Do you have a lawn mower? You can mulch green prunings with that (not too big ones though). And there's lots of stuff being generated in towns that you can use. You can also grow mulch.

    If you haven't mulched like this before you need to do some research on different mulches and what they add or take away from the garden so you get the mixes right. It also depends on what part of the garden you are mulching (vege beds are different than shrubs).

    Linda Woodrow as a good chapter on this in her permaculture book.
     
  18. sun burn

    sun burn Junior Member

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    I see thanks. I am near a beach and can get some seaweed but it would be very very labour intensive to collect. I am putting my newspapers into my compost. I mainly want to mulch my vege patch at this point. I will move on to my fruit trees after that. Mowing over weeds is quite a good idea. I would have to collect them in a pile first. I am thinking again on the idea of making a weed soup.

    Today I bought a large round bale of hay. Straw is not available here. It cost me $18.50 and i bought 5 bags of horse poo which cost me $15 and petrol about $5. I think its reasonable value.

    I wasn't sure about how good leaves would be. Do the leaves of native trees create acidic soil conditions? I've got lots of mango leaves which are mulching the mango trees. But my neighbours hydroponic rubbish pile is helping me heaps as a source of compost materials.
     
  19. scottjunner

    scottjunner Junior Member

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    Sun Burn,

    Can you please clarify why not palm fronds? I don't understand.
     
  20. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    I live in a very different climate and ecosystem so can't comment on your local plants sorry. I use leaves as mulch, but it's not the only thing I am doing in garden, so it's a matter of learning from what you do and what happens already where you live. The straw and pony poo sound like a good deal.
     

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