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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Survivor bias, quite literally in this case. You don’t know about the weeds that find it hard to grow in your garden, because they don’t grow there. The weeds you notice are the ones that find it easy to grow in your garden.
Meanwhile, what are the odds that the plants you want to grow in your garden *just happen* to be perfectly suited to your local environment? Unless you learn to eat the local weeds, you’re always going to be competing against the most prolific local species when you try to encourage specific plants to grow.
Leave a chihuahua and a coyote in the woods, who do you think will survive? Your garden plants are the chihuahua and coyotes are the weeds.
The weeds are growing in a situation they are suited for, the other plants maybe not so much. Some vegetables and fruit grow easily in certain areas because it’s an ideal situation for them and can possibly spread like weeds, but many have been developed over the years to produce certain attributes like larger fruit or seeds and in order to provide that it takes extra nutrients, sun and water, or less of any of those in whatever combination.
Soil in nature is unlikely to sit barren otherwise it could lead to the soil drying out and erosion. Some seeds just happen to take hold in those situations easier which is good. It breaks up compact soil and deposits nutrients other plants might take advantage of
As others said weeds are often better adapted to your specific environment. And some weeds are nitrogen fixers that can grow in terrible soil conditions. Also worth noting is that in agriculture or in your garden you are applying a selective pressure. You pull the weeds by hand for example, then the weed that can survive that will thrive better because it might have a deep root that grows back, or a rhizome that doesn’t come up when pulled. In essence the weeds that are easy you can get rid of but the ones that are left are those with an adaptation against your applied methods. Try to get rid of Purple Sedge, it has both a tuber to grow back from and fixes nitrogen. That makes it a very very difficult weed to control without chemicals.
No wonder my desired plants hate me, I forced them into a foreign land and expected them to thrive. Oops.
“Weeds” are the plants that are native to your location. They’ve been here for a million years, and they’re well-adapted to the climate and soil conditions where you live. They *flourish* there in fact.
Most garden plants are straight up invaders. You should find out online where the plants you’re planting come from. Most of them are from particular parts of China if I’m not mistaken. But the end result is that you need to reproduce the specific soil and irrigation conditions of that region, in your yard, or they won’t grow.
This is also kind of why the entire endeavour of cultivating those specific plants in an alien environment is crazy. Also, you’re going out of your way to destroy your local ecosystem. Possibly also with poisons that leech into the rest of the environment and local wildlife.
Beauty isn’t as strong a survival trait as we’d expect them to be.
What we’d call weeds are just highly successful plants. They do well in a lot of climates and conditions. When I bought my property it came with three gardens of lilies. We wanted one of those gardens to just become grass (because it was leaching on to the sidewalk) and another to be a rock garden without lilies.
Every time I mow the lawn I’m mowing down lilies. Every year lilies magically appear in our rock garden. The only thing that can beat lilies for space are dandilions.
Many plants considered to be weeds have specifically evolved to thrive where other plants don’t. It’s been in their best interest to grow quickly and produce highly viable seeds as quickly as possible to reproduce and spread.
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By definition a weed is an undesirable plant. Yiu didn’t try to grow it and it did. So only the most hearty of weeds will grow.
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