Five Potential Benefits of Keeping Weeds in Your Yard
Gardening projects during the growing seasons can be a great experience for gardeners, and they can be a nice way to get outside and spend some time in the sun. However, as many seasoned gardeners know, weed growth throughout the growing season can be an ongoing challenge, due to the propensity of weeds to grow and spread quickly in yards. Potentially damaging weeds, such as dandelions and crabgrass, can spread quickly and outcompete your grass for vital resources in your lawn. This can lead to different kinds of weeds taking over your lawn, but fortunately there are many safe herbicides out on the market. If you want to remove weeds, look for products with lawn safe ingredients like MCPA and Dicamba, which can help suppress or eliminate weed growth without damaging your lawn’s health.
However, while maintaining the health of your gardens or lawn is important, you may be surprised to learn that some weeds might not get in the way of your landscaping plans. Weed infestations can be harmful, but some weeds can have unique advantages that can benefit the health of your lawn or garden. In this post, we will look at the potential advantages weeds can bring to your landscaping.
1) Nitrogen Fixation in the Soil: There are specific kinds of weeds, like clover and vetch, that are plants which are effective at fixing nitrogen in the soil. Nitrogen is a vital nutrient that promotes healthy plant growth and it contributes to strong and healthy colors in your plants. Common fertilizers often contain ingredients that help your lawn by improving its nitrogen levels. Lawns that have balanced levels of nitrogen generally have greener, lusher, and happier plants. One advantage of some weeds, is that they can fix nitrogen into hardened dirt patches, and they can help improve soil quality for eroded areas of your yards.
2) Moisture Retainers: Weeds can aid with water retention in your garden as well, by improving the soil quality in your yard. This can help prevent areas of your yard from drying out or eroding, by cycling nutrients and revitalizing hardened soil. Many weeds are natural pioneers and they can help cultivate hardened soil for free, to better prepare it for future garden and landscaping plans.
3) Food/Nectar for Pollinators: Some weeds, like daisies and goldenrod, can provide food for local pollinators. Bees, butterflies, and other pollinating bugs are often vital for the health of your garden plants. If you do not have many flowering plants in your yard, these weeds can provide a small snack to local bugs and pollinators.
4) Companions for Companion Planting: Companion planting is a technique and approach in gardening where certain plants are grown together in order to enhance each other's growth or repel pests. Weeds like yarrow and chamomile are good examples of this technique at work. Yarrow repels harmful aphids, while chamomile attracts beneficial insects that prey on garden pests, thus creating a natural pest control system. By selecting plants with mutually beneficial relationships you can create plant synergies within your garden and help it flourish better.
5) Increasing Carbon Density: For areas of your yard or garden that have little plant life, weeds might be more advantageous to help re-cultivate any spoiled dirt or desiccated soil by contributing organic carbon to the carbon cycle in your yard's ecosystem.
Each gardener gets to decide what plants they wish to live in their backyard ecosystems. Gardeners have the choice to determine what plants add to their yard and which ones do not, so feel free to be creative with your own gardening or landscaping design decisions. Some plants, such as various species of crab grass, may spread quickly and damage your lawn, but other weeds, such as clover, aren't as invasive and can potentially improve soil quality in the areas of your yard that need it.
We hope you enjoyed learning more about the potential benefits weeds can have for the ecosystem of your garden or yard. And remember, there are plenty of lawn safe herbicides available on the market if you change your mind about keeping any weeds around.