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May. 27th, 2026 08:45 amThis is my first permanent garden, where I haven't had to move away within a year or two. As a result it's my first long dance with perennial weeds. The whole thing is rather fascinating. When I was a kid I'd read things in, for instance, Organic Gardening magazine or gardening books which said to put down a cover crop and then till it in. I didn't have a tiller, I was a kid and the most I could afford was seeds. I got this idea that tillers would chop up green stuff into quite little pieces and incorporate them into soil.
Fast forward three and a half decades and I have a tiller. It doesn't chop up long pieces of anything, they just wind around the axle which holds the blades. Smaller things, less than eight inches or so, it does incorporate as long as they're not in clumps that are too dense. Now maybe a tractor-drawn tiller would do a better job but mine is pretty powerful for a hand tiller. I kinda wonder what those books were on about, back then.
Theoretically if you till a field full of perennial weeds, you break them up into pieces and from each piece a new weed grows. If you till a field of annual weeds before they go to seed you mostly kill them. So over time a field that gets regularly tilled will tend to accumulate perennial weeds.
It's not the orderly process I'd expected. Something will show up, a single plant in a field, one year. If I let it go to seed the entire field will suddenly be full of something. For instance my weeds might flip from grass to sculpit for a year or two, then to scentless chamomile, then to canada thistle, then back to grass. I'm not sure if this is a moisture thing, a cultivation thing (spacing between rows etc allows different things to establish?) or what.
Fast forward three and a half decades and I have a tiller. It doesn't chop up long pieces of anything, they just wind around the axle which holds the blades. Smaller things, less than eight inches or so, it does incorporate as long as they're not in clumps that are too dense. Now maybe a tractor-drawn tiller would do a better job but mine is pretty powerful for a hand tiller. I kinda wonder what those books were on about, back then.
Theoretically if you till a field full of perennial weeds, you break them up into pieces and from each piece a new weed grows. If you till a field of annual weeds before they go to seed you mostly kill them. So over time a field that gets regularly tilled will tend to accumulate perennial weeds.
It's not the orderly process I'd expected. Something will show up, a single plant in a field, one year. If I let it go to seed the entire field will suddenly be full of something. For instance my weeds might flip from grass to sculpit for a year or two, then to scentless chamomile, then to canada thistle, then back to grass. I'm not sure if this is a moisture thing, a cultivation thing (spacing between rows etc allows different things to establish?) or what.
