Why do weeds grow almost anywhere so easily, but growing food crop requires so much care and is so difficult?
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The simple answer is energy. There are barely any calories in weed since it requires little sustenance to grow. Hence why it can grow almost anywhere as long as there is a little bit of water around.
Crops need to be calorie-rich, which means more nourishment needed besides water. And because they have more calories, they’re more attractive to microbes that cause diseases, requiring further care.
Weeds aren’t really a thing unto themselves. They’re just a label humans made up for plants they don’t like. So a food crop could be a weed if it was growing where it wasn’t wanted.
And “food crops” grow just fine on their own without human involvement. The issue is growing enough of them to support the demand, growing them to extremes (e.g. making parts of them grow faster/larger), and growing them to the exclusion of other things.
This takes care and can be difficult because it’s simply contrary to how plants grow in nature. We’re basically trying to manipulate how they would otherwise grow naturally to suit our artificial needs.
A lot of food crops do occasionally row on their own randomly, which means that those food crops are effectively weeds when they do.
Likewise, there are things that we call weeds that can be used for food. Dandelions are completely are completely edible, every single part of the monkama and you can make a lot of good food out of them.Likewise, there are things that we call weeds that can be used for food. Dandelions are completely are completely edible, every single part of them, and you can make a lot of good food out of them.
The biggest thing is just that if you are trying to grow as much of one product as possible, you have to do extra work to keep out other plants. If you were trying to grow a field of dandelions in particular, than any random beans that get in there would be weeds to you.
Weeds are just plants that grow where we don’t want them to – if corn started growing in a crack in the road, that would be a weed, despite it being a source of food.
Weeds thrive in depleted soil. In fact you can tell a lot about a soil by the weeds growing there. For example, field horsetail, field mint and creeping buttercup indicate severe soil compaction and excess moisture, while nettles and chickweed indicate that the soil is rich in humus.
Food crop requires constant maintenance and renewal to grow that specific plant. And if they’re not doing crop rotation on that field, requires artificial means, which can be insufficient to address the needs of that crop.
Whereas good soil with a healthy balance will have ‘weeds’ that are very nutritious like nettles and lambsquarter.
Weeds thrive in depleted soil. In fact you can tell a lot about a soil by the weeds growing there. For example, field horsetail, field mint and creeping buttercup indicate severe soil compaction and excess moisture, while nettles and chickweed indicate that the soil is rich in humus.
Food crop requires constant maintenance and renewal to grow that specific plant. And if they’re not doing crop rotation on that field, requires artificial means, which can be insufficient to address the needs of that crop.
Whereas good soil with a healthy balance will have ‘weeds’ that are very nutritious like nettles and lambsquarter.
As stated elsewhere, ‘weed’ and ‘crop’ are artificial labels. They’re all just plants. But typically what we call a weed is a plant that we don’t want that shows up a lot – that is, it grows quickly and easily. So, it’s sorta self-selecting, isn’t it? You’re asking why weeds grow anywhere so easily but we define ‘weeds’ as plants that grow anywhere easily and are unwanted.
Natural selection and adaptation.
Ruderal plants – “wild” weeds that grow first in a given location- have adapted to grow quickly and spread seed with few inputs other than the weather and sunlight.
Crops selected by manual cross breeding to produce specific plants (food crops) have to be seeded or cloned to reproduce and thus require significant inputs to grow and mature/fruit.
The trade off is desirable characteristics of plants- flavor, yield, heartiness, pest resistance, time to maturity etc. compared to “wild” crops.
Producing food crops require regular care, but is not difficult especially when done on a large scale.
A weed is just a plant growing where you don’t want it.
When you prepare a field you create an ecological vacuum with ideal growing conditions. You want a plant bred for its usefulness to humans to grow unimpeded and without competition. That’s the work you put in: clearing out everything else so that only the desired plants will be present.
You’ve also created an ideal space for everything else to grow, and plants that can get their seeds in there most easily will do so. That’s just what they do, and is the reason why clear fertile spaces devoid of competition are rare and short-lived in nature. To be clear, crop plants will do this as well if they can (they are bred for other things do are less competitive in this regard). I’ve seen wheat and corn growing on the edges of fields long after that crop was grown there deliberately. Were it virulent enough the farmer would have to put effort into fighting back prior crops too. That would be good reason not to breed such traits into them, but this would probably not be an issue anyway.
Vast monocultures see whole fields of a single species with the same nutrient requirements. This drains such nutrients from the soil and inhibits future growth, so you are unlikely to see last year’s weed crops out competing this year’s crops. The traditional solution is crop rotation: to plant different crops in a given plot each year, that rely on different nutrients and in some cases put them back. Such rotation usually includes a fallow year, where a field is left unsown and nature is allowed to reclaim it (or fallow seeding occurs in which non-crop plants are sown). This restores the soil for the next crop.
You’ve got the cart before the horse here. We call them weeds BECAUSE they grow everywhere and spread easily.
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