Weeding Is Not Unskilled Labor

There’s too much at stake to leave it to inexperienced people

A bouquet of weeds held by the author. Thistle, Wild Lettuce and Bindweed.

Weeding is an essential task in farming and gardening, whether you’re growing vegetables, medicinal herbs, fruit/nut trees or field crops (such as grains and legumes).

The term “weed” is relative, of course. Broadly speaking, a “weed” is any plant that the gardener or farmer doesn’t want in their growing space, but this will vary from person to person and place to place, and sometimes from one period of the growing season to another. The term “weed” is generally used as a pejorative, and while that isn’t entirely fair to the plant species itself—which is after all only following its own nature, and is neither good nor bad in and of itself—I will be using it here for convenience.

I am speaking from my own observations and experiences as a gardener and a farmer and a farmworker. As with virtually every other activity or tradition in our society, I have not participated blindly, and have always striven to retain and sharpen a view from the outside the arena, as much as I have been able. I have always been aware of the fact that—relative to both history and to other contemporary societies—it is just the game imposed on us in this time and place, and its rules are neither sacrosanct nor unquestionable.

On most farms where I’ve helped out, either as a paid worker or a volunteer, weeding is considered an unskilled task that anyone can do. But the more time I’ve spent in agricultural settings, the less I agree with that. First of all there are practical considerations, and I’ll start with those. I have deeper concerns as well, and they follow.

By “weeding” I mean any and all methods of removing unwanted plants, including by hand (plain old pulling), with non-mechanized tools (hoes, etc.), with machines (weed-whackers, flame weeders, etc.), and with chemicals (herbicides, insecticides and fungicides).

As you move up the scale from manual to chemical, collateral damage is more likely both to crops and to the human workers. When you’re on your hands and knees yanking weeds, it’s easier to safeguard neighboring plants, and the only physical danger is from repetitive stress or sore muscles (not to trivialize either one, as they can become debilitating in time). By contrast, with a hoe, a weed whacker, or a backpack sprayer it’s tricky, if not impossible, to knock out the weed but spare the crop plant.

I’m entirely opposed to chemical pesticides in agriculture (or in restoration or in landscaping or anything else) and it it was up to me, they’d all be outlawed. I’m also leery about many of the “biological treatments” allowed under certified organic standards as well. But the environmental and health issues with pesticides are for another essay; today I’m focused on the other methods of weeding, and why they’re not “unskilled” and shouldn’t be assigned to someone who is inexperienced without supervision.

Two entirely practical considerations cannot be ignored:

1. Distinguishing the weeds from the crop

This might seem like a no-brainer, especially if someone is shown in person: “Here’s the crop, and here are the weeds.” Yet, for someone with little or no knowledge of plants, this could prove to be challenging, especially at early stages of the crop, when it might be unrecognizable if they’ve only seen the full grown stage (or at no stage at all).

So a person new to weeding might take out the wrong thing. I’ve seen it happen.

2. Removing the weeds effectively

A) Some weeds pull easily from the soil in one piece, with their roots and the job is done. B) Others are likely to break off, leaving the roots behind, and will grow back. C) Still others are virtually impossible to get rid of by weeding alone and can only be knocked back temporarily. Here I’m thinking of perennials like Bindweed, certain species of Thistle, and others that spread by means of deep, tenacious root masses. With such plants, it would be a waste of time to try to dig them up entirely, and doing so will actually spur their growth. Bindweed can resprout from a piece of root less than an inch long! To get rid of such weeds, other strategies are needed—like shading them out with perennials or smothering them with plastic—but these are years long processes.

So a person new to weeding might spend a lot of time on a row or a bed but it was a waste because they either didn’t remove weeds completely (case B), or they spent too much effort on ones that can’t be gotten rid of that way (case C). Again, you can be like, “yeah I can show them” but if the helper is new, these are likely consequences.

In both these cases, I was talking like they’re just pulling by hand. If the person is not experienced with a hoe or weed whacker, the chances of error greatly increase. Like any tools, you need practice to get good with them. I myself am quite familiar with various hoes and weeders, both long-handled and hand-held, and am somewhat adept with weed whackers of various sizes and power, but I still end up taking out something I didn’t want to basically every time I use such tools. Partly this is due to poorer eyesight at my age (I was born in 1969) but it’s also inherent to the tools themselves given that you’re increasing the distance between yourself and your targets and non-targets. The nerve endings in our fingers are really quite helpful for precision work, and you’re giving that up once you’re holding a tool and your contact is vicarious.

Also, tools of any kind, whether mechanized or not, introduce an element of danger. When using a handheld tool with a sharp edge, you must always be aware of where your other hand is, lest you cut yourself. Any long-handled thing you’re swinging can miss the mark and end up bashing you. I’ve done both, multiple times, this season included. Safe use of a weed-whacker requires long pants and long sleeves, closed-toe shoes, goggles, and ear-protection plus an N95 mask or at least a bandanna for the fumes and dust. Laden with all this, you’ll want to limit such work to the mornings, before it gets hot. With all these tools there is, again, concern about repetitive stress and other muscle injuries, which an experienced person learns to avoid with proper stance, switching sides, and knowing when to quit.

The author, weed-whacking for fire-suppression in Sonoma County, California, summer 2024. I chose to wear a pink face mask for style.

Everyone starts out as a newbie, it’s true. But besides that, some people will be able to learn and develop weeding skills better than others, whether due to their personal gifts and constitution or to previous experience with other plant work, in this life or previous ones. (More on the factor of how possible past incarnations can inform this one in another essay, lol.) Regardless, some people will be good at weeding and others won’t. Let me stress: It’s really not something that just anyone can do well. Seriously.

A Note about Weed-whackers

I really hate them, tbh. They can be handy when needing to clear out a large area, especially one without anything you want to save. (So is scythe—just sayin’—thought it also requires practice and furthermore must diligently be kept sharp.) As mentioned, the noise and the fumes and flying debris are all hazardous. But there’s also something about them that I’m tempted to describe as diabolical. They seem hungry to urge the user to wipe everything out. Maybe it’s the vibration running through one’s body, or the power they have. I don’t know, but they seem to discourage feelings of caring. It’s like that cliché that when you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you’re wielding a weed-whacker, everything looks like a weed. They satisfy an unwholesome desire in our culture to clear it all away. “Cleaning up” is what people say but the psychological result is too easily unclean, in my opinion.

Keep in mind—weed-whackers are killing machines that don’t just take out plants. Other victims include insects at every stage of development, including ones in which they can’t flee, like caterpillars in chrysalises, or eggs in cases. Spiders, lizards, and toads are also victims. Every patch of “weeds” is also habitat, and might be home to beneficial insects. A scythe, by contrast, spills far less blood.

People who don’t know plants are the last people in the world who should be using a weed whacker. First because maybe there’s something in that patch worth saving: for example a rare species that escaped the attention of the person who assigned the task, but which they would want to keep if they knew about it. Second because of hazardous plants like Poison Ivy or Poison Oak, which when chopped up and sprayed on clothing or skin, can be quite harmful, especially for folks with extra sensitivities to them.

But the biggest reason that weed whacking shouldn’t be done by someone who doesn’t know plants is that it’s a terrible way to introduce them to plants. “Here,” you’re saying. “Take this totally indiscriminate tool and wipe out everything you see. Don’t make any judgment calls whatsoever about what you’re doing and just raze it all to the ground. Doesn’t matter what.” That’s obscene. Personally, I don’t want to kill any plants unless I know them, and I reserve the right to refuse.

Which brings us to my deeper concerns.

Weeding is killing, and like al killing, should be approached with careful attention and humble intention.

Now, humans have favored some plants over others for many thousands of years, since before the institution of agriculture, and have chosen to locally eliminate certain plant species perceived to be competing with the favored species. Wildtending preceded farming, for example, and included practices like intentional burning. In what is now called California, some Native Americans regularly set fires in Oak savannas to suppress Fir trees, which could otherwise compete with the Oaks. Other beneficial effects included the suppression of weevils who eat the acorns, the encouragement of berry bushes and medicinal plants, and the preservation of sight lines for hunting. Grasshoppers cooked by the fire were an additional bonus in some areas and seasons.

We can think of the Firs as being “weeds” in this context, in that they were unwanted and therefore removed, but in other areas, the Firs were left alone, such as in higher elevations where Oaks didn’t thrive and the Firs provided an overstory for other plants used for food, medicine and crafts. So the Firs were not viewed universally as undesirable; only when they sprouted among the Oaks. We can characterize such wildtending practices as working with a landscape.

Agriculture, by contrast, is the practice of dominance over a landscape. Exceptions exist, and if we’re smart we’ll make them the norm.

Ceremony was often a hallmark of indigenous lifeways, including wildtending practices, and we contemporary folks would do well to incorporate such into our farming and gardening. I’m not talking about “playing Indian.” Yes, we should be inspired by what other people in other times and other places have done, but we have a responsibility to cultivate our own senses and awareness of the here and now, and then to conceive ritual that’s rooted there. It’s no good to just mimic something. We have to mean it.

One idea I’ve had along these lines is that every farming or gardening year should start with an offering to the upcoming season’s victims, plants and animal alike. The people who are planning to work together that year could gather, each bringing their very favorite beverage, whether that’s a particular beer or a fancy latte or a brand of soda or whatever. After acknowledging that the work will inevitably entail the inadvertent or intentional killing of various plants and insects and animals, everyone takes a sip and pours the rest out on the ground. It’s your favorite beverage, so it’s a sacrifice to do so, at least symbolically. Such a collective acknowledgment would be a way of raising awareness about the costs to the more-than-human world of our human endeavors. It’s not a license to just do whatever after that but rather a starting point for encouraging “careful attention and humble intention” throughout the upcoming season.

Killing is a heavy business and the more thoughtlessly we do it, the more we desensitize ourselves to living. The effects of our desensitization to the more-than-human world are obvious in both individuals and in our cultures. We are, by and large, unfulfilled and unhappy. We are also wreaking destruction across a planet we no longer perceive as worthy of respect. Trivializing the form of killing that is weeding displays a reckless lack of concern for the psychological or spiritual cost it can incur on us humans individually, even in a small way, and on our collective perspective of plants in wild or feral settings.

I suggest getting to know the “weeds” where you live, including (if not especially) the ones you really dislike. What are their names? Who are they related to? What are their uses for humans? What are their roles in the lives of the plants, animals, fungi, etc., who are also your neighbors? That is, who’s eating their leaves or collecting their nectar or interacting with their roots? We are, after all, all in this together, human and more-than-human alike.

tldr: Yes, we need to weed our gardens and fields—of course we do—but we don’t have to be dicks about it.