I have just planted dandelions, purslane, millet, wild lettuce in my garden beds to improve the soil. Weeds bring up many minerals that the veggies don't. I am not sure where the hate of weeds ever came from. Weeds improve the soil. I noticed in a bed when mulch was thin, and the grass came up through it, the English peas did better than in areas with thick (weedless) mulch, so now I encourage my weeds. The peas were more productive, and healthier. I have a notil garden, so I guess that is why. Constant tillage promotes weeds. Nature is trying to fix what we broke. Nature abhors bare ground. The more bare ground you have, the more weeds you will have. The more you til the worse your "so called" weed problem will be. When I needed to plant into a bed covered in weeds, I weed wacked it. I am sure it was faster and easier than chemicals or pulling. This was only to allow sun to hit the newly planted seeds and to provide mulch for the hungry soil life. Mostly I did this, to install a trellis for my cowpeas. I hate digging to insert the poles, but this is a one time thing (until the poles rot), so soil life should not be too angry with me. I was not interested in "killing" the weeds, just making them shorter. I use soil plugs in the mulch so I do not have to pull the mulch back to sow seeds. Seeds will not sprout where plants already exists thicky, which is the main reason I thick we got the idea weeds are bad. Just cut back the weeds where you plant the seed and and area around the spot to allow sun to hit it. Pulling weeds or crops is a no no for me. The roots aerate the soil, and provide food for the soil life after they die. Rootless soil get compacted easily and is very bad for soil life. When alive, any sort of roots are teaming with life to help your garden. Gardeners should get more in tune with nature (and the way God made earth's garden) and promote life not death, by killing weeds, pests, fungus, earthworms and other soil life. When killing is focused on, the work load increases. If soil life is killed by gardening practices that do not respect soil life, you will have to use fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and more water. Pests only are attracted to sick plants. Weeds only show up where they are needed. Feed the soil, not the plants. I planted cowpeas directly in the sod. It performed better than the mulched bed. The American Indians only weeded right around the freshly sown corn seeds, to help it to sprout and to let it get sunlight, but when the corn got taller they did not waste time on such silliness. I think that weeding came into vogue from places with extremely short and cold summers, like england. I guess the theory is, that bare soil is warmer. Everywhere else weeding is really not necessary. I think to emulate nature is the easiest way to garden. Here is some info on nature's way. The Weeds as Indicators Of Soil Conditions The Weeds Friends or Foe? The Using Weeds as Indicators of Turf Management and Environmental Conditions Soil Indicator Weeds Soil What Weeds Can Tell You About Your Garden Soil Controlling weeds and pests Soil Healthy Naturally Weed Power - Weeds and What they Mean If you are at battle with your weeds and like everything to look neat and tidy, then the newspaper and mulch thing works great. I had no weeds when I have used that technique. Mulch is hard to come by here in July and August in Texas, unless I plan to waste water by watering the yard to get the grass to grow in the heat of summer. That is how I decided to go with the flow and use nature's way to keep the soil cooler and moisture in by allowing weeds to get tall. The longer the weed's roots, the farther down water will penetrate.

Great discussion all around. Appreciate everyone's viewpoints & contributions. Kinda busy, but a couple of quick thoughts: As others say, I don't think we are going to significantly de-industrialize any time soon - hopefully we can move quickly towards doing it smarter. I'm not totally opposed to industry or economy of scale ...but we've got to learn to do it with more closed-loops, better designs that turn our problem 'wastes' into resources, etc. We have the know-how of how to meet our basic needs and restore ecological health. We know how to regreen the desert (Geoff Lawton) or restore degraded pasture land while grazing MORE animals (Allan Savory) - As Olpea pointed out, the political will isn't there. So much inertia built up in this approaching-train-wreck of an economic system. How much crappier do things have to get before the growth-at-all-costs nonsense gets tossed? While the rest of the world is figuring that out that growth at all costs, I work on facing up to my own consumption, which is humbling. I am doing my best to withdraw from 'feeding the beast', growing what I can at home, saving and sharing seed & seedlings. Buying what I can't grow from local & organic producers. Most of all, my wife and I just refuse to live a consumerist lifestyle. I laugh every time I take out the garbage because there really is so little of it. We could easily go a couple months without taking out the trash, the next step is cutting down on the recyclables. No-till: Fukuoka did it to good effect with rice, equalling yields of his counterparts using 'green revolution' approaches. There are pockets of Japanese farmers here and there quietly using Fukuoka's method. Hopefully, I'll have the chance to visit one of these farms next time I visit Japan. In the west, I have heard of a lot of people experimenting with no-till or perennial grains, interesting glimpses, but no stunning successes. After a few thousand years of breeding annual grains for till systems, it's not surprising that progress might take a few generations. John Jeavon's biointensive offers small-scale grain production which builds biomass every year, but that is backyard scale - beds double dug by hand. There are many different growing systems out there that will bring high yields without undermining future ability to produce. I don't think there are any one-size-fits-all solutions, but different for each situation. Lastly, I have to emphasize that, despite occasional differences of opinion, I think horticulturalists and farmers, conventional or organic, are some of the best people on earth.

Gaaa, I am so embarrassed; I better go to the original source and ask permission. Ugh! but now I can't find the site to ask permission. Sigh, this is so embarrassing I was hoping to just show that the coconut husks and the rice hulls have a very spaghnum-like quality/look to them. Next time I will have to do link references instead! Much more safe, legal and appropriate! Trust a nimwit like me to make this mistake. I just know it was a Dave's Garden secondary link so I will have to try to retrace and get permission. Plus I need to ask the person/website owner how they got their rice hulls and coconut husks as well. Well, looks like my potted roses are a huge offender-- almost all POTTING SOIL IS COMPRISED OF PEAT MOSS. Which is the worst part that I have to face. I was about ready to dump a bunch of potting soil, manure and mulch into a new raised bed come November and get a few more potted roses too, uggggggh!!! P.S. I am soooo glad that many of you are getting your spaghnum moss from New Zealand. Indeed out of all the countries they seem to be the most careful and most conscientious. Thank you for the link SweetCicely! Hopefully this will encourage everyone to get their spaghnum moss from New Zealand instead. Most other countries do the all at once tractor drainage type of scenario. For newbies and people who get the common ordinary orchids, I think that the bark is just fine. It's getting the potting soil substitute which is the huge challenge. Ugh! I will have quite "a shovelful" to deal with. I am definitely starting with pine straw too! It's not exactly cheap but I think it's good to support conservation whenever possible... My action plan: put fall leaves, mixed in with manure, pine straw, try to find coconut husks and rice hulls as well. My concern is that the bed won't be ready for my climbing roses, but ah, well. I will have to take that risk.

Ah..a political agenda? What kind of a political agenda would that be? Regardless, let's not get ad hominem. Useless. Let's stay on topic. If you read climate research, another kind of global change that evokes strong emotions you will rarely if every come across judgmentality. Whether warming is good or bad is not proven. you cannot do that. However: what you can prove is that global warming is antropogenic. Caused by humans. You cannot prove it is unnatural. What people think about it, is not up to a scientist. It is up to themselves. I don't like it at all and am all for action. The facts here are very clear. Within the climate research, which can be found in nature and Science, there is no doubt. The same cannot be said when it comes to invasive species. There is ample peer reviewed research, done by ecologists themselves, that shows what I say. The lithany of judgemental and value laden wording does not have any place in science, yet it is almost a constant in ecology. And it has a strong influence in the perception of people to what is simply a living organism and at times, a sentient being. I have read many scientific research on it and my point is precisely the opposite: I think most people are simply reiterarting what they have been hearing time and time again without reading on the subject. Niot from outsides, like you see in climate sience, but ecologists working in the field. What bothers me is that this ideology has all the signs of what we see in human culture. That the ideal of some system is worht more than life. That individuals have no value, have no meaning and should be killed. This also has a strong aching to what we see (and tend to fear and despise) in antisocial people, who fail to acknowledge that other people matter, have intrinsic value. That other people have rights, emotions and feelings. Hence extreme antisocial people kill people without a second thought and do not mind one bit. I have seen this been propagated in nature towards various animals. And they are sometimes killed in the most painfull way imaginable. Like the GRey Squirrel in the UK, which is killed by using warfarine so it slowly dies a painfull death from internal bleeding. An alternative is clubbing the pups and, if they ca catch thhem, their parents to death. That is what extremism and hatecampaigns can do. Another thing I have seen in Scotland when I was there and in The Netherlands is the propaganda that is genetically inspired. The Scottish Red dear, which is not a subspecies at all and is not threatened in any way worldwide, is now at the "threat" to be mixed with Sika deer. They have fertile young, which do just fine. Seem happy. Nothing is wrong. But the Scottish Landscape Trust (or what is called) says that "pure blood" Scottish Red Deer are at the verge of extinction. There is nothing wrong with the mix, the calfs are not sterile..Nope. But they have no rights and need to be killed. Wrong blood, wrong place. LEts shoot 'em... In Nl there are quite a few who want to use pure Dutch Beech trees which seeds have been selected an stored, to repopulate the country. Foreign beech trees are no good... The White Tail Duck and the Ruddy Duck have fertile offspring. They are as dissimilar as blacks and whites among people. Yet the Ruddy Duck needs to be killed, because the White Duck would be extinct. And it is unnatural. However, a passerine is naturally hybridising in Europe now. That is okey, it is nature... Now I do understand these are extremes but they are the direct result, again like we have seen in culture so many times, of the thought that nature should be pure and that bastards are no good. Foreign species are somehow worse than native species and need to be eradicated when possible or when they threat our ideal view of the world.... So to me, saying that native is somehow better than nonnative is not as innocent as it looks. I find it very strange actually. I think a species is in its place where it can survive on its own. It seems well adapted, at least for some time, to the place it now occupies. Ceertainly in times with rapid change (climate change) an inflexible attitude towards these seems not feasable. If climate change starts to shift climate zones more and more, you might end up with nothing or very little native things that can grow where they used to... Native and nonnative is a dichotomy that has no meaning in the natural world, only in human culture. It puts evberyhting in a historical context and not in a contemporary one. It seems to be aimed to freeze thing in atime (the past mostly) and on many occasions involve the killing of sentient beings on massive scales as it devaluates their lives based on their origins. and on may occasions without any sight on some final result. Finally, it also puts makind in the position to decide what should and hsould not live somewhere, again making nature and the natural world dependant on us and at times halting processes continuously. Like the spread of Juniperus virginia to the prairie or Pinus sylvestris in NL to occupy the heath again. As this is a continuous proces, this kind of management (which is certainly not unique) means large areas are dependant on economy. If economy fails considerably and there is no more money for maintenance, all the work to keep the landscape in some personally preferred state was in vain. That is my gripe with this. I find it unethical at times, not based on natural but human preferences and strongly based on prejudice rather than facts.