Weeds Grow on Nothing. Strawberries Want Everything.

You don’t need to do anything to grow weeds. They will arrive on their own. A patch of dirt left alone for two weeks will produce a colony. They do not require fertiliser. They do not require water beyond what falls from the sky in unpredictable bursts. They certainly do not require encouragement.

If you want a strawberry — a single edible strawberry — the situation is different.

You need approximately one million kilograms of cow manure. You need to till the soil to a depth that suggests you might also be looking for buried treasure. You need to space the plants exactly so. You need to mulch them, water them, and stake netting over the bed because birds have opinions about strawberries that, on the whole, align with yours.

Then you need to weed.

Not casual weeding. Not “I’ll get to it on Sunday” weeding. Surgical, laser-precision, get-down-on-your-knees-and-look-at-the-soil weeding. The same weeds that grew on nothing will now compete viciously with the strawberries for the resources you carefully assembled. They are good at this. They have spent the entire history of plants getting good at this.

You will lose some battles. The slugs will eat the strawberries you successfully defended from the birds. A single stem will rot for reasons you cannot identify. The deer will visit. They are taller than the netting.

If everything goes right — really right — you will get a handful of strawberries the size of cherry tomatoes that taste better than anything in any supermarket on earth. They will last about three days. The next year, you do it all again.

Meanwhile the weeds, ungrateful but undeniably impressive, are still growing on nothing.