Weeds and Seeds: A Gardener's Companion

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Most gardeners will be shocked to learn that there are only two bad weeds — grass and buttercups. All the others are valuable in Peter Weis’s highly individualistic scheme of soil management.

Weis is a columnist for a West Coast newspaper, and Weeds and Seeds is a collection of his columns. His style, though folksy and meandering, is as non-conformist as is his gardening.

He is against two things: chemical fertilizers, which he calls poisons, are enemy number one; “bad bugs,” which he calls “buggers,” are number two. His cure for bad bugs is to encourage good bugs, which kill bad bugs. For poisons, the answer is weeds. He recommends gardening in weeds. Weeds among the rows of vegetables, vegetables sharing their beds with the weeds (except for carrots and onions, which, apparently, refuse to co-operate in this scheme).

“The weeds are trying to tell us something,” Weis says, and their message is to use composting, mulching and companion planting to save the earth from poisoning. One weed for which he had hopes is the kudzu vine, an Oriental relative of the bean, which grows “a 400-pound root and... has swallowed buildings whole.” He wants to use this to feed the starving masses. Not surprisingly, Weis calls himself “a political gardener.”

The book contains considerable how-to information on growing a wide range of vegetables and a few flowers. The advice is slanted to the Vancouver area, although, with allowances for soil types and the lack of seaweed to be found inland, it should have widespread application.

Philosophy is liberally mixed with the directions for applying chicken-manure, making the book especially appealing to the armchair gardener.