How An Erratic Monsoon Might Make Us Appreciate Weeds

The erratic monsoon this year has proven problematic for crops, but has been great for weeds. Short downpours followed by long periods of sunshine have resulted in places like Goa being submerged in these opportunistic plants. As soon as they are cleared with weed trimmers, a new green wave emerges.

“A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place,” wrote George Washington Carver, the great agricultural scientist. When farmers first separated plants they felt were useful — such as wheat — from those that were not, they created the category of weeds. In the Bible, weeds are Adam’s punishment for eating the forbidden fruit; the earth, which once was bountiful Eden, is now cursed: “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee...”

Richard Mabey, in Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants, argues that biblical farmers benefited from weeds: “The soils of the Middle East are thin and infertile... The crops roots would have fixed them to some extent, but without the weeds that rapidly colonise disturbed soil, the bare gaps between the rows would still have been vulnerable to dust-blow, erosion and nutrient loss.” The roots of weeds stabilised the soil, and later, their decaying plant matter helped nourish it.


In Asia, weeds affected the domestication of rice differently. Water was usually abundant, and rice tolerated water-logging, so flooding the fields helped drown weeds. Aquatic weeds remained a problem, but draining the fields stopped them, and the rice stalks could tower over new weeds. It’s a strategy which helped rice feed millions, but monsoons like this one point to the bigger problem: What happens when there’s inadequate water for flooding paddies, but enough for the weeds?

Until the advent of modern herbicides, which brought their own toxic problems, the main ways to deal with weeds was cutting or eating them, either by livestock or humans. Some weeds evolved poisons to deter this, but most adapted to spread by the means used to stop them. Weeds grew very fast and produced thousands of small seeds. Seed pods would explode while their plants were being cut, or attach themselves to farmers’ clothes or the coats of animals.

Other seeds survived being eaten and, in an era where animal dung was the main fertiliser, they came up again in the fields. It’s no surprise that many farmers figured that eating weeds was the

best way to live with them. Some plants, like goosefoot (Chenopodium album) are consumed so widely that they are part-crop, part-weed. As bathua in north India, it is often an essential part of sarson ka saag, the milder leaves helping balance the pungency of the mustard leaves.

Weeds were vital for poorer communities, like the indentured Indian workers in South Africa’s sugarcane fields. ‘Cane herbs’, mostly varieties of amaranth, which grew amid the sugarcane stalks, were a free and nutritious addition to their meagre diets.

Patience Gray’s remarkable Honey from a Weed celebrates the weed-eating traditions of the Mediterranean. She started living on its shores long before it became a tourist destination. The villagers she lived with ate weeds partly as medicine, partly at times, like early spring, when there was little else to eat, yet partly as a delicacy in themselves relished for their bitter and sour tastes: “Washed at the fountain, they were boiled and served with oil and lemon juice.”

The Mediterranean diet is much lauded for its healthiness and Gray was convinced that weed eating was at its core. Traditional Indian diets also included plants like these. During Diwali, Bengalis observe the choddo shaak ritual, where 14 leafy greens, both cultivated and foraged, are cooked and eaten. Rishi Panchami in western India is marked by a simple dish of boiled greens, mostly gathered wild, as the ancient rishis would have done in the jungles. It falls on September 15 this year and the abundant weeds of this monsoon will ensure.