The Right Weeds
January 5, 2025
Back in the Covid days of 2020, newly retired from a dairy farming career and transplanted to New Hampshire from the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland, I was roaming the woods and fields of our new place and weighing possibilities for making this property, blessed (or otherwise, depending on perspective) by years of benign neglect, back into some form of a working farm.
Among the flora, I found some familiar faces that I'd known on the Eastern Shore, some long lost friends from my New England and New Jersey youth, and some plants I'd never met, or at least never paid attention to before. All that benign neglect had provided a great opportunity for the soil seed bank to deploy. Stages of succession ranged from goldenrod taking over more recently grazed pasture to thickets of choke cherry and hawthorn, and towering white pine on hills abandoned to nature decades ago.
Joe Pye weed, blue vervain, boneset, and blue flag iris had all made their stand in wetter spots, while yarrow and wild strawberry claimed a droughty hillside. To eyes accustomed to looking over acres of lush rye and orchardgrass, it looked in no way like a field of dreams. Just a field of weeds. Still, courtesy of a florophile father and a Vermont country raised mother, I have an affinity for and curiosity about wild landscapes too. In nutrient management work, I had designed vegetative buffers for farm fields. And I'd grown enough vegetables to know the value of pollinators. I had used parasitic wasps for fly control on the dairy, and watched ladybug larva devouring aphids in the garden. A little research revealed that my crop of weeds were at the top of the list as hosts for a plethora of pollinating, predatory, and parasitic insects. According to the Xerces Society publication Farming with Native Beneficial Insects, these insects provide as much as a 4.5 billion dollar value in ecological pest control services annually (Xerces 1). Multiple studies have shown that populations of beneficial insects are significantly higher in native plant landscapes than non native ones (Xerces 45).
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And it isn't just about insects . These native plants support our bird populations too, Joe Pye with summer necter for the hummingbirds, boneset and blue vervain as winter seed sources for cardinals and juncos - the list goes on and on. But the ecosystem contributions of these plants don't stop at the soil line either. Their various sizes and types of roots hold soil against erosion, protect water quality by taking up excess nutrients, and help to maximize subterrainian biodiversity, which will be reflected by the biodiversity we see above ground.
In short, these pasture weeds are the right weeds - native flora that the fauna have evolved with. Plants that belong in our New England landscape, that belong along roads, around gardens, at lawn edges, interspersed with farm crops, and at work in urban storm water management. So instead of eradicating them, we propagate them, and invite others to join us in recreating the contiguous indigenous landscape that a robust ecosystem requires.
Work cited
Xerces Society. Farming with Native Beneficial Insects. North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2014.
