Weeds grow, well, like weeds, out of the cracks of the pavement with nothing but municipal runoff to keep them alive. Meanwhile I have to work tirelessly to keep my tomato and pepper plants happy and fruitful. Why do weeds dominate a garden?
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Keep in mind also, that for 10s of thousands of years, humans have been applying a selection pressure in their gardens, by pulling weeds they don’t want. The ones that can stick it out somehow, have better genes. These better genes then show up in the weed the next year. The gardener pulls 100, but 2 had particularly strong roots and so were able to come back. Repeat that about a trillion times and you have now, by the very act of weeding your garden, selected for genetically superior weeds.
Conversely…to the comments about your desired plants not being native. That’s part of it. But here, human selection is working in the other way. In the wild, a tomato is gonna want to be cherry-golfball size. This size achieves the top goal of passing forth it’s genetic material (in its seeds), without having to pump an inordinate amount of energy into a large fruit (think: beefsteak tomato. Not gonna find any of those in the wild). Now, in our breeding efforts over the millenia, we’ve developed particular desires for the attributes of that fruit. Big, red, meaty, juicy, plentiful. These are all attributes the wild plant has no care or need for. And all of those attributes require an amount of energy optimization the wild tomato just doesn’t require, because it’s local genetics are in equilibrium with what it needs to reproduce successfully. Some of the recessive genes hiding in the background may become important in the future if that local climate changes…that’s kinda why they’re hanging out in the back pocket….all of this to say, that in our selecting for our desired qualities, we’re creating plants that are less inherently tough because their energies are being genetically directed to do things that aren’t really in the plant’s best interests (heavy fruiting etc).
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