Conservation-WEEDS By: Kevin Williams, Grundy County Conservation Director

I grew up on a small farm in Iowa. My family always had a large garden. Most of my conservation career has involved trying to grow “good plants” like trees and prairie. While Ralph Waldo Emerson may have viewed weeds as “plants whose virtues have not yet been discovered,” few farmers and gardeners take such a benevolent view of them. Weeds can be defined as plants growing where humans do not want them. A plant that grows very vigorously, crowding out other, perhaps more desirable, plants, may also be described as a weed. Weeds can be any plant that’s growing where we don’t want it, and I learned early on that weeds are bad! My first real memory of weeds was when my brother and I were old enough to be sent forth with spades and corn knives to do battle against thistles in the pasture. After a lifetime of pulling, hoeing, spraying, mowing, and otherwise fighting weeds, I’ll have to admit that I have developed a respect for these despised members of virtually every ecosystem known to humanity. A recent article in Pheasants Forever’s magazine offered the logic that weeds are more than just an unwelcome, though natural, part of most ecosystems. They’re actually a critical habitat component that many forms of wildlife can’t do well without! Think about it. Most of our weeds are annual plants that sprout from seeds after the soil has been disturbed by something. They are nature’s troops and are the first to begin growing to recover the soil after a disturbance. They live only one growing season so most of them produce lots of seeds to insure their future survival. Perennial plants that include many of the ones we favor in wildlife plantings depend less on seeds and don’t produce as many. Seeds large and small are a critical food source for many kinds of birds and animals, so it stands to reason that those heavy crops of weed seeds are important for them. Most of our permanent wildlife plantings are dominated by perennial plants by the time they reach three or four years old unless there is a new source of disturbance. The flowers perennial plants produce may still be very attractive to pollinators, but the number of seeds produced in an older, more stable perennial community of plants will be lacking compared to a younger, more disturbed stand of plants that includes lots of annuals that we call weeds. The Pheasants Forever article highlighted a weedy plant that almost everyone loves to hate in late summer and early fall – ragweed. Its pollen is a potent allergen that can make us miserable with runny noses and itchy eyes. Ragweed releases huge quantities of it into the wind to fertilize their seeds. They also create huge crops of seeds that have some of the highest protein and fat content of any seeds available to birds and animals. On top of that, they often hold those seeds well into the winter rather than dropping them where they’d be buried by snow and ice. Deer love to nibble the plants while they’re green. In other words, ragweed is ideal wildlife food. Weedy annuals hung on because nature always provided sources of disturbance to trigger their growth. A grazing herd of bison or elk or cattle left a good deal of disturbance. Their disturbance set back (but didn’t kill) perennial plants, and triggered the sprouting of more annuals. The infamous pocket gophers (that my dad despised provided my first trapping experiences) boiled up fresh black soil that were rich sources of bare ground needing a quick cover – provided by those ever-ready annual weeds! Let me offer this – God doesn’t grow any weeds, only a large variety of annual and perennial plants that all serve important rolls in keeping the soil in place and the land’s wild creatures well fed. Keep that in mind the next time you head out to do battle with some weeds.