3 Great Uses for WEEDS!

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Have you ever wondered if there's great uses for weeds around your yard scape? You know, it's springtime, all the weeds come out, and is there better things you can do than just throw them in the garbage or send them to the landfill? You bet. Stay tuned, and I'll show you at least three things you can do. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. It's springtime here in northern Utah. It has been raining late spring rains, and it's just cleared up in the last 48 hours. And as you know, weeds love this kind of weather. What's up with that? You can hardly get ahead of them. Well, we have a fairly large yard scape, about two and a half acres, and there are a lot of garden beds and the weeds really take off. We have literally been pulling out wagon fulls of weeds for the uses I'm going to tell you about in just a few minutes. Not only does it help to clean the beds out and to give the plants the nutrients they need, the ones that are desirable, but you can use these weeds for other great uses, at least three of them. Well, let's give you use number one. First one is to feed your animals, your livestock. Now, you have to be a little bit careful on this because if you're feeding goats or cattle or horses, you need to check with your extension service or agricultural service and find out what is safe to feed them. But we have found right here that prickly lettuce and just regular range grass, the chickens love it. And there's something really gratifying about pulling a weed out and then watching it go down the gullet of a chicken only later to become compost, if you get what I mean there. So, that is a great use number one. And by the way, they'll self-feed. You can put piles of it in their coop and they'll root around in it and look at the dirt that's on the roots and pick around the leaves and they pretty much self-select. So, hey, put it to the chickens or the livestock first. Hey, use number two, a little bit more obvious, but that's just regular composting. Now, whether you're doing large scale, like you can see in this shot, or you are doing small scale, the basic idea is the same. And that is to mix both greens, which the weeds are high nitrogen, which is biomass, along with other browns, such as soil, sawdust, shredded paper, those types of things, wood chips that come out of stock barns. All of that can be mixed into there. And then the magic ingredient is water. Now, you may be thinking, is it safe to put all those weeds in there with all that seed? Yes, if you do it early in the season before everything has a chance to go to seed and you get the internal temperature of the compost pile up high enough that it kills the weeds. We have found that any weeds that do come on are very far and few between and easy to pull when you've got really nice organic material to work with in your beds. This brings us to use number three that we use around here in our yard scape, and that is for weed suppression itself. I love the idea of using the weeds against themselves to be able to control weeds. And the way you can do that is obviously when you pull out the weeds, you can put them back into the beds and heavily blanketed areas. Some of our beds have got lots of growth, so it's easy to just tuck that all back and around there to do a couple things, build biomass, and number two, to suppress any new weeds coming on. But here's something else that we use it for. We have a small vineyard, as you can look around here, you can see it's early spring, pruning's already happened, and now everything is flushing on right now with new growth for the year. But if we don't control the weeds and the grass at the bottom of things here, then it gets pretty nasty. And as you can see, this area here, this is okay. This has actually got some things thrown on it, but look at this is what you get if it's not controlled. You get a lot of grass here, right there is that prickly lettuce that I was telling you about that the chickens love, but it's all in here. So if you look around the vineyard here, you'll see that I've already pulled out most of the grass and I've already started stacking this, all the things that we pulled out. By laying down a thick covering of biomass like this, you're depriving the weeds of one of the things they need, and that's light. The other two is water and nutrients, but if you take one of them out, you're really going to suppress the amount here. Well, let's look and see how this works here. As you can see, we have a large amount of grass and weeds that came from some of the other beds out in the back of our property here. And all we're going to do is just take out generous amounts of this and place it down on the bottom, very thick like that. Okay, there we have it. If you look down here, you can see that there's a generous pile of organic material that's over that row that's going to keep those weeds suppressed, keep the moisture up, soil temperature even. So that's a great use for weeds. Now you may be thinking, hey, what if I don't have a lot of weeds or I end up having to put them in the trash container and it gets hauled off the landfill? Well, I have it on good authority. A good friend of mine who is actually one of the main people that runs a multi-city landfill operation here in northern Utah that tells me that organic material like weeds, grass clippings, lawn clippings, all of your hedge trim, all that sort of thing, when it goes in the landfill, it actually helps decomposition. And in their operation, they're actually able to take the decomposing garbage there, which creates methane gas, harvest it off, and actually use it to run large-scale generators, which is put back into the power grid as green energy. So rest assured there's other good green-minded people like yourself that are working on the other end of this equation to make it work really well. Well, those are some tips for you that you might find to be helpful. I'd like to ask you a favor. If you have any great uses for weeds or biomass like this around your place, why don't you put it in the comments below and let our other viewers know some of the ways that you make use of green materials from your yard scape. If you found this to be helpful, why don't you like the video, and better yet, why don't you subscribe to our channel? That'll help us to continue to make great videos about the home, the garden, the shop, the and product reviews. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.