When you leave your urban life behind to live on a couple acres and grow your own food, its good to have some secret weapons.
The secret weapons I *would* have chosen, if I could choose, would have been things like unlimited money, a tractor that works most of the time, some outbuildings, fences, and the like. What I actually got was ragweed, and a lot of it.
Ragweed's latin name is Ambrosia, or ‘gift of the gods.’ Its clear that the gods gift stuff in mysterious ways. Around here, the gods have gifted ragweed to the ditches on the roadways, the fields, the fence-lines, and yards that aren’t mown. Here in Ohio, ragweed is considered to be in the top five worst weeds for farmers. It clogs machinery, takes over fields and reduces grain yields. If you have hay fever in late summer, you can probably blame ragweed pollen.
I’m ...fortunate.. enough to have both giant and common ragweed around my property.
I say I’m fortunate, because I’ve found ways to make ragweed work for me. First, I use it as a shade and cover for my laying hens. The picture above is one of three stands of ragweed I allow to grow in the chicken pasture. Even common ragweed gets to be 6 feet tall or more, (giant ragweed can get to 15 ft tall!) and by the time it is knee high, the chickens have made paths and little nooks in the ragweed mini-forest to spend the hot parts of the day. As it grows, the chickens eat the lower leaves, leaving a thick canopy over them. We have red-tailed hawks and bald eagles in the nearby woods, and they can carry off a chicken if they see one out in the open, so the cover overhead is great for the chickens too.
I like to peer in at the girls in the afternoon while they are napping or dust-bathing in the ragweed. It looks cool and secret and inviting, if you are chicken-sized.
My closest neighbor is very allergic to ragweed pollen, so I work to keep the ragweed on my property from flowering and going to seed. I do this by topping the stands at about chest high periodically. Ragweed tends to grow in bunches because it is allopathic to other plants- it doesn’t allow most other plants to grow in its close area, creating thickets or stands of ragweed. I just take plant snippers and wagon around and do a thicket here and there as I have time, a couple times a week. On my two acres, it isn’t very time consuming.
The ragweed tops, along with any weeds I’ve pulled from the garden go to the rabbits, or in the compost area of the chicken yard. The rabbits love it almost as much as purple clover. During the summer, the rabbits eat the greens, and barely touch the manufactured pellet feed. The chickens, who get plenty of other greens in the pasture, also like it well enough to nibble on while they are scratching it into compost. The greens the chickens eat, including the ragweed, makes their egg yolks a healthy bright orange.
According to Utah State University, common ragweed greens have a crude protein of about 23%, depending on the time of the summer. Alfalfa’s crude protein is about 24%. Supposedly the ragweed seeds are almost 50% protein, as high in oil as soybeans, and are tasty (but since I don’t let mine flower and seed, I don’t have first hand knowledge of that).
Another way I use ragweed is in the garden beds I am preparing for next year. I like raised beds, since it is mostly clay and silt soil here, and have used strawbale bads and lasagne beds to fill them. This year I’m actually starting a year early with next year’s new beds. I put down frames, and used layers of cardboard under it as a weed barrier. I’m filling them with straw, leaves and ragweed. They’ll break down until next spring, when they should be ready to plant into. Ragweed has large amounts of biomass, is easy to pull up even when it is 6 feet tall, and does not propagate from cuttings. The leaves break down very quickly, and the tough, woody stems break down in a just a few months. The allopathic chemicals it releases while growing seem to dissipate once it is dead, so it won’t stop my lettuce from germinating once it is composted. If it is pulled before it flowers, it is safe to just throw in a waiting garden bed, or if composting, it can be broken to fit the bin, and tossed in. Some people might get a contact rash when they pull it up, and the stem has small bristles too, so gloves are nice.
The patch where I pull the ragweed is usually bare, given the nature of the stuff, so a few days after, I seed that area with something I want to grow there. I keep a packet of asparagus seeds on hand for those bare spots, since I think having random patches of asparagus in my ditches is a good use of the newly cleared waste spaces. I’m pretty sure the gods who gave us the ragweed will understand.
Edited to add: Thank you so much for the recs, shares, and the rec list and spotlight! :D What a nice thing to wake up to!