The Amish Never Pull These 6 Weeds (More Valuable Than Your Vegetables)

[00:00:00]It is a warm Saturday morning in June.

[00:00:02]You are kneeling between your tomato rose with a five gallallon bucket beside you pulling weeds. Your knees ache. Your lower back is starting to complain. The bucket fills up with dandelions per slain clover and that stubborn plantain growing by the fence post. You haul the whole load to the trash pile and you feel good about it because that is what every garden book and every bag of weed killer ever taught us. A weed is the enemy. At least that is what I believed for 30 years. Then one June morning, I walked through my Amish neighbor's vegetable garden and I stopped dead in the middle of a row. There were weeds in it on purpose growing right alongside the cabbages and the pole beans. And Daniel just smiled at the look on my face. That morning I learned that six of the plants I had been ripping out and throwing away were worth more to my garden than some of the vegetables I was protecting. Today I am going to walk you through all six of them. what each one looks like, what job it is doing, and how to manage it instead of fighting it.

[00:01:13]And stay with me to the very end because the sixth one is a weed. Daniel actually plants on purpose at the edge of his garden. And the reason comes down to one particular insect that lives on that weed, nowhere else on your property.

[00:01:30]Once you hear why, you will never look at that plant the same way again. I'm Bill, though most folks online know me as Backyard Bill. I garden on a little piece of land in rural Ohio, right alongside an Amish settlement. And those families are my neighbors, my friends, and my greatest teachers for too many years. I fought my garden with a roatiller and a shelf full of chemicals, and I lost that fight every single summer. Most of what I know now, I learned across the fence from my friend Daniel, whose garden defends itself the way mine never did. Now, before we get to weed number one, I want to talk about what all that pulling actually costs you. Because I never once stopped to ask, when you strip every green thing out of your garden except the vegetables, you leave bare soil. And bare soil in July, sun bakes hard, dries out, and can climb past 100° right at the surface. That is 100° hot enough to cook the fine feed of roots living in the top 2 in. The water you paid for with the hose evaporates by lunchtime. And nature hates bare ground.

[00:02:40]So the soil answers the only way it knows how, by sprouting a fresh crop of weed seeds. So you pull again next weekend and water again and buy another bag of mulch and another bag of fertilizer. And around and around it goes. I rode that merrygoround for years. Then Daniel gave me a different way of seeing it. Leaning on his fence.

[00:03:01]One evening, he told me, "The plants that show up on their own are not invaders. They are volunteers and most of them are working. Some feed the soil.

[00:03:11]Some feed you. Some read the ground like a written report and tell you exactly what is wrong underneath your feet."

[00:03:18]Now, in fairness, a few weeds really do earn their bad name. But you'll and I will point those out as we go because I'm not going to tell you to hug your bindweed. But keep that sixth weed in the back of your mind, the one with the insect, because it is the finest example of this whole idea that I know of and it is coming. Now, everything I am showing you today is one piece of a much bigger system. And I wrote the whole system down in a book called the 30-day Amish pest proof garden protocol. It is the complete oldworld approach I learned from my Amish neighbors for building a garden that defends itself from pests without chemicals laid out as a 30-day protocol any home gardener can follow one day at a time. It is 117 pages and it walks you through the five defense layers, the seven foundations and the setup week. All four weeks of the protocol from kill nothing, build everything through the self-defending garden and then the deeper skills, seed saving, hand tools, and preserving the harvest. If you are tired of buying the same sprays every single season, the book is $17. That is $17 marked down from 47 set against a shelf of chemicals you have to buy again every year. The book you buy once and it stays on your shelf like the old almanac did. Go ahead and grab your phone and open up your camera, the same one you use to take pictures. Point it at that square code on your screen and hold it steady for a second. A little link will pop up. Give it a tap and it will take you straight to the book. And if you are watching on your phone right now, the link is waiting for you right down below in the description. Take your time. There is no rush at all. I'll wait right here. All right. Weed number one. And it is very likely in your garden as we speak. Per slain. If you do not know it by name, you know it by sight. It grows low and flat, spreading out like a little green doormat with smooth, fleshy paddle-shaped leaves and reddish stems.

[00:05:29]And it always picks the hottest, driest, most miserable spot in the garden. The gravel edge, the crack by the walkway, the bare patch where nothing else will take. I pulled pursane by the bucket full for years, and never once asked why it was thriving, where everything else quit. The answer is that pelane stores water in those thick leaves the way a cactus does. And while it sits there, it is doing the job I used to pay for in bags of mulch. It shades the soil. It cools it. It holds the moisture in.

[00:06:04]Daniel calls plants like this a living blanket. And in his garden, pursane runs freely through the pathways and under the tall crops, keeping the ground underneath soft and damp, while my old bare pets used to crack like a dry rivered. And there is a second surprise.

[00:06:23]Perslane is food and good food. It has a crisp lemony crunch. Folks have eaten it fresh and cooked for generations and I have seen it for sale at farmers markets for several dollars a pound while gardeners two miles away were throwing it on the burn pile. One honest warning before you taste anything. Pelane has a lookalike called spurge that grows in the same flat mat. Snap a stem to check.

[00:06:51]Spurge bleeds a milky white sap and pelane does not. If you see milky sap, leave that plant alone and only eat pelane from ground you know has never been sprayed. As for managing it, the rule is simple. Let it run in your pathways. Pull it only where it crowds right up against a young seedling. And when you do pull it, lay it back down on the bed with the roots facing up because those stems can rroot if they touch soil. And a pulled purse lane makes a fine mulch right where it fell that handles the floor of the garden. But the next weed earns its keep in a way that genuinely shocked me because it works as a bodyguard. Weed number two, lamb's quarters. This one stands upright, one stem reaching up with soft leaves shaped a little like a goose's foot. And here is the giveaway. The young leaves at the top were a dusty silvery white coating almost like they were dusted with flour and water beads up on them like mercury.

[00:07:52]Lamb's quarters is a close cousin of spinach and beets and country families cooked it like spinach for gener long before anybody paid for salad in a plastic box. But the job that matters most in your garden is this. Lamb's quarters is what old gardeners used as a trap crop, which just means a decoy. The leaf miner, that little pest that draws pale, squiggly tunnels through your spinach and your chard, actually prefer lamb's quarters. So Daniel leaves a few plants standing near the greens bed and the miners go to the decoy first. And uh when you see those winding trails show up in a lamb's quarters leaf, you pick that leaf and you drop it in a bucket of soapy water and the next generation of miners dies with it. No spray involved.

[00:08:41]One leaf picked is 100 tunnels prevented. The deep roots also pull minerals up from the subs soil. So when I cut a plant down, I lay it right on the bed and let those minerals feed the surface. Now the honest warning, and this one matters, a single lamb's quarters plant left to mature can drop tens of thousands of seeds, tens of thousands from one plant. So the rule is firm. Enjoy it, use it, but cut every plant down before it flowers. Never let it go to seed inside the garden fence.

[00:09:16]Weed number three is one your grandfather probably paid good money to put in his lawn. And the lawn companies later taught us to kill. White clover.

[00:09:25]You know it. The three round leaflets, the little white blossoms humming with honeybees all summer. Pull up a clover plant sometime gently with a hand fork and rinse the roots. You will see tiny pale knots along them like little beads.

[00:09:42]Inside those knots live soil bacteria that do something no vegetable can do.

[00:09:48]They take nitrogen straight out of the air and fix it into the ground. They take nitrogen straight out of the air and fix it into the ground. And nitrogen is the exact ingredient you are buying when you carry home a bag of 101010 for 25 or $30. The clover does that work free all season every season. That is why Daniel's people have always grown clover in their pastures and let it wander their garden edges. In my garden, clover is the pathway carpet. I let it fill the walking rows. I run the push mower over it every couple of weeks and the clippings feed the beds while the roots feed the soil and the blossoms feed the bees. And those bees do not just visit the clover. They stay for the squash blossoms and the cucumber flowers 10 feet away. Keep clover out of the beds themselves if it starts to matter around small plants. An edging tool along the bedline once a month does it.

[00:10:47]But in the paths that plant is an employee working for free. And speaking of insects, hold on to that thought about the sixth weed because we are getting close now. And the insect story waiting there makes the clover and its bees look like a warmup act. Weed number four does its best work without lifting a leaf because this one is a messenger.

[00:11:12]Broadleaf plantain, not the banana, the yard weed. It grows as a flat rosette of tough oval leaves with strong ribs running lengthwise. And it sends up those tall, skinny seed spikes that kids used to shoot at each other across the yard. Here is what took me 30 years and one Amish neighbor to learn. Plantain grows where soil is packed hard. The driveway edge, the path you walk every day. the corner of the bed where the wheelbarrow always turns. That is not an accident. Plantain is one of the few plants whose roots can force their way into compacted ground. So, wherever it shows up, it is reading the soil for you and filing a report. And the report says, "The ground here is squeezed too tight for good vegetable roots, too tight for water to soak in, too tight for the worms to work. So, do not fight the messenger." answer the message. Take a garden fork or a broad fork, push it in beside the plantain about eight inches deep. Rock it gently backward to crack and lift the soil without turning it over. Move a step and do it again.

[00:12:24]Then spread an inch of compost on top and let the rain carry it down. Do that and a strange thing happens. The plantain thins out on its own over the next season because the condition that invited it is gone. No spray, no digging war, and your soil is better for it.

[00:12:43]When a weed leaves because you fixed what it was pointing at, you start to understand what Daniel means when he says the garden was never supposed to be a war. Weed number five is the most hated plant in America, and it might be the hardest working one in your yard.

[00:13:00]The dandelion. Every spring, the garden centers build a whole aisle around killing it. And every spring, Daniel's family harvests theirs. Start underground. A dandelion drives a taproot straight down a foot or more and in soft soil deeper still, drilling through hard pan that no vegetable root can crack. When that root dies, or when you cut the plant at the soil line, it leaves behind a channel, a ready-made tunnel that rainwater follows down and earthworms follow up. Every dandelion in your garden is boring a well. And while it is alive, that root is mining. It pulls calcium and other minerals up from 2 feet down. Minerals your shallow lettuce and beans could never reach and it stores them in the leaves. So when I cut dandelion greens and lay them right back on the bed, I am hauling fertilizer up from the basement for free. Then there is the flower. That bright yellow bloom is one of the first meals of the whole year for bees. Waking up in March and April, weeks before your fruit, trees, and vegetables have anything to offer. And the pollinators it feeds in April are the same ones working your tomatoes in July. The whole plant is edible, too. The greens, the flowers, even the roots roasted the old way.

[00:14:22]Though, bitterness is honest work. I will warn you. Managing them is easy once you stop digging. In the beds, cut the plant off at the soil line with a knife and let the root keep drilling. It will sprout again and you cut it again.

[00:14:37]And all the while the well gets deeper.

[00:14:39]If the seed puff balls worry you, snap the flowerheads off before they turn.

[00:14:44]That is it. Now, the sixth weed, the one I promised you at the start, the one Daniel plants on purpose, and the one insect that explains everything. Weed number six is stinging nettle. And I can hear some of you groaning from here because yes, it is exactly the plant you think it is. Brush bare skin against it once and you will remember the burn for the rest of the afternoon. So, let me say it plainly. Wear leather gloves around nettle. Wear long sleeves. Keep it away from paths and away from where grandchildren play. Now, here is what stopped me cold. At the north edge of Daniel's garden, tucked behind the last bed, there is a nettle patch about 6 ft long. It is not an accident and it is not neglect. He put it there and his father kept one before him. The reason is a tiny insect called the nettle aphid. That little aphid feeds on stinging nettle and only on stinging nettle. It cannot live on your beans. It cannot live on your tomatoes or your roses. Nettle is its whole world and it wakes up early in April when the rest of the garden is barely moving which means the nettle patch fills up with aphids at the exact moment ladybugs are coming out of their winter sleep hungry and looking for one thing. So the ladybugs find the patch. They feed there and they lay their eggs there and their larve, those little black and orange alligator looking things that each eat hundreds of aphids grow up right there on the nettles. By late May, there are generations of them. Then June comes and the bean aphids and the pea aphids finally show up on your vegetables the way they do every single year. Except this year, 20 ft away, there is a standing army that has been eating and breeding for 2 months. And it moves straight onto your rows. That is the whole mechanism. The nettle patch is a barracks. It feeds your defenders on an insect that can never touch your crops.

[00:16:52]So, your protection is already grown up and hungry before the attack ever starts. Without the patch, the ladybugs drift in weeks late after the damage is done. With it, the garden defends itself, which is the entire idea my neighbors have been quietly living out all along, and nettle gives you a second gift while it stands guard. Cut a batch of stems with your gloves on. Pack them loosely into a fivegallon bucket till it is about half full. Cover the nettles with water. Set a lid on loosely and let it steep for two weeks downwind because it will stink like a barnyard. Then dilute it one part tea to 10 parts water and feed your leafy crop. The the old folks called it nettle tea. And it is a rich free plant feed pulled from a weed most people burn. Just keep the patch honest. Cut it back before it sets seed and mow a clean strip around it so it stays where you put it. And that is the heart of what Daniel taught me. The garden was never supposed to be a war.

[00:17:57]And the proof is a patch of stinging nettle quietly raising an army of ladybugs at the fence line. The book is the whole 30 days of that thinking layer by layer so your garden can start defending itself this season instead of someday. It is $17 down from 47. And I will just say that one jug of spray costs more than that and treats one symptom one time. The book stays with you. Now, go ahead and grab your phone and open up your camera, the same one you use to take pictures. Point it at that square code on your screen and hold it steady for a second. A little link will pop up. Give it a tap and it will take you straight to the book. And if you are watching on your phone right now, the link is waiting for you right down below in the description. Take your time. There is no rush at all. I'll wait right here. So, there they are. Six weeds worth more standing than pulled.

[00:18:56]Purrlane the living blanket. Lamb's quarters the decoy. Clover the free fertilizer. Plantain the messenger.

[00:19:04]Dandelion the well driller. And Daniel's nettle patch the barracks. Did your folks or your grandparents garden without chemicals? Tell me one thing they did below. Those are exactly the methods worth saving. I rate every single one. Next time I'm going to show you why Daniel pounds a row of plain wooden stakes about 5 feet tall along his bean rows every July and what lands on those stakes at first light that clears more beetles in one morning than I ever managed with a sprayer. Work with nature, not against it. And I'll see you in the garden.