Weeds: The Bane of My Existence

Andrea Pohlsander
Apr 18, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Apr 30, 2025

Cockleburs.

I grew up in a little town in Northeastern Utah called Bluebell. We lived on a mid-sized farm about 200 acres and raised cows, sheep, and pigs. Every summer, my dad would have us boys go out into the fields with a shovel and dig up the small cocklebur plants before they got really big, pile them up, and then burn them.

Hour after hour of backbreaking work, the small spines were digging into your skin through jeans, leather gloves, you name it.

Small wonder at the age of 18, as soon as I graduated from high school, I took an easier job in the United States Marine Corps. Bliss, no more cockleburs.

Bluebird Homestead

After a bunch of different adventures, a medical discharge, a new career, and many years of travel around the world, my family and I got tired of the rat race of city life. We bought a small homestead property in Southwestern Iowa of about 9 acres.

We have three primary goals that we want to accomplish with our homestead.

Keep the peace that we wanted to attain when we moved back to the country
Feed our family and, if possible, make it self-sustaining.
Don’t work too hard. This is supposed to be enjoyable.

Bliss again, peace, quiet. Everything was green, grass just grew - no irrigation - and our garden would just grow.

Gardening Heaven

We bought a small Bobcat CT235 tractor and a tiller attachment, and I tilled up a “small” garden about 60 feet x 80 feet.

We planted:

6 hills of zucchini
6 hills of cucumbers
8 entire rows of different kinds of potatoes, onions, four different varieties of peppers, and,
120 tomato plants strung up on a support system made from t posts and ¾ inch electrical conduit.

We were going to make a killing at the farmers market.

Heaven to Weed Purgatory

We started out great, got out our hoes, and worked on keeping the weeds down. Easy right? About the 3rd week in June, I hurt my back, and just like that, what was a dream soon became a nightmare.

Weeds sprouted everywhere - boy, were we surprised. Where we had grass before, now we had weeds that were growing faster than our garden plants.

Our well-thought-out gardening heaven was now a muscle-wrenching, sweat-inducing backbreaking level of toil. Our dreams of selling quality organic produce at the farmer’s market went down the drain. Our 120 tomato plants seemed to take over the world.

And - yes, you guessed it - my old friend the cocklebur was back. What we thought were potato plants turned out to be a persistent weed that, if you let it grow it grew nasty burs on it that would stick to clothing, pet’s hair, and made pulling the weeds an even worse backbreaking chore because they have deep root systems.

Burning and Churning

We ended up letting the garden go until the fall, where we burned everything down, dismantled the garden, and then tilled the ashes into the ground—a lot of effort for minimal reward.

We then started a bunch of research into alternative growing styles. Among things we researched were:

Greenhouses - If you can control the environment, you can grow vegetables all year round.
Aquaponics - if you want to get rid of weeds - create an environment where you can completely control them and not allow any type of weeds to get in.
Alternatives to High-Powered Weed Killers - growing organic and being environmentally conscious.
Raised Beds - If you can’t fully control the environment, control as much as you can. Raised beds can help with this.

Lessons Learned

My advice to you is:

Keep things small to start - thinking bigger than your dreams can quickly turn on you.
Think about weeds - all of us have weeds in our lives. If we can nip them in the bud or better, dig them out with a cultivator, then we’ll have more to show for our effort.
Try to create environments that are protected so you don’t have to weed. Greenhouses, raised beds, and aquaponics are options here.

Later in this series, I’ll discuss our journey back to no-weed bliss, raised beds, and building our own aquaponics greenhouse.