I have neglected the front yard, except for stripping away vines. I am fairly carefree and some weeds have grown at least six or seven feet in height. I enjoy providing space for nature’s intelligence, or as I like to call it, “nature’s anarchy.”

The other day I discovered a super-nightshade plant in the front yard. Quite massive, several feet wide, hundreds of ripe berries on it. Because intellectually I am still afraid of the berries and the literature that I have read clearly stating they are not has not yet sunk in, and because I did not want hundreds of these plants popping up all over the place, I pulled up the nightshade plant.

But as I pulled it up, scores of its ripes berries fell all over the place, and rolled into cracks and other places I could never reach. Well, those are going to be weeds for sure. I then asked myself, “What will I do with this large plant? I can’t bring it in the back yard, the plant will surely proliferate all over the garden.”

The course I chose was to leave the plant in its place. I thought for a little while longer and decided that to stop the seeds from sprouting, I could cover the area with a tarp or heavily mulch it so the nightshade seeds don’t sprout to the top layer.

Then it occurred to me the berries are excellent plant food. I should have left the plant where it was, growing, creating life, supporting birds and insects, but instead, because of my “fear” of weeds, I pulled the plant from the ground.

The lesson is to carefully think about the extra work I will create for myself by pulling up a plant before I pull it up.

Nightshade in the back yard:

There are some thick stalks of nightshade in the back yard from which I have been pruning new growth. My strategy is to exhaust the plants by removing their energy source, and when the plants die off, their roots will have aerated the soil and supported beneficial fungal and microbial growth. Ripping up roots of plants which are a large size creates more of a disturbance and more chances for other “weed” seeds lodged in the earth to get brought up to the surface for germination.

When I see small nightshade sprouts, I pull them up and compost them separately from the main garden compost pile to build soil in desolated areas.

So what I should have done in the front yard is pruned all the branches from the main root of the nightshade. Or just left it to grow and support life. Instead, I’ve just left it there for all the seeds to sit in the open and germinate.

Lesson in reactive behavior: weeding nightshade by mehron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International