agree with wayne. not letting them seed is big. But I prefer to react, and pull only when I see flowers or seed heads. Weeds are good for the soil, in particular for winter soils as they keep some micro-flora alive. they help with nutrient cycling. they need to be managed, not eliminated. I also eat/juice a number of them. anyhow, nice articles, Lazy.

Both are 3 year old (2013) articles covering a topic discussed by many organic growers back in the 1970's. However, as glib points out, weds can be good for the soil, and most "weeds" are really just wild flowers that many of our native pollinators have learned to live on over the eons before we started altering the habitat. Those "weeds" may also be important in keeping the Soil Food Web alive during periods of dormancy.

A good organic grower would have a place for many of these "weeds", a place that provides a habitat for the beneficial insects desired that need them to exist.

kimmq is kimmsr

I plant some cover crop that dies over winter rather than depending on weeds.

I am myself more and more using buckwheat and oats, which require no clean up. But just a few weed roots in a bed will keep the mycorrhizal network alive over the winter. Oats will not do that. You can then pull the weeds just before seeding in spring.

glib, You are assuming the mycorhizal association to be quite important and that spores don't over-winter.

The mycorhizal association can be very helpful to some plants and likely not at all to some others.

spores will overwinter, but an intact network allows so much more rapid growth. Basically, once the seedling is connected to said network, its root system becomes 10, 100 or 1000 times more powerful. When you start over with spores, the plant development is delayed by the lack of development of the network.

I also agree that not all plants need this association. In my case, being a rather old fashioned type of gardener, 50% of my garden is brassica or beta species, which do not connect to the network. still, my field results show a positive correlation between yield and delaying weeding to spring or doing just seeding weeds removal.

Weeds will generally rob small seedlings of light. They will seldom rob them of nutrients, since they are just temporarily stored in a weed, but not removed. And all tests show that a soil covered with vegetation will lose less water. and weeds do maintain biological resources. I do think there is an optimum, and that optimum is for non-zero weeds. One can always grow his own edible weeds, for example by growing overwintering chicory or celery in every bed.