Yes, I do it every year to grow thousands of dollars of food for the small CSA I operate. I spend more time taking money and handing people baskets than I do working in the gardens and greenhouse. What did you have trouble with exactly?
What about them? A weed is simply an unwanted plant. If they do no harm, why do you want to spend time removing them? Again, plant a good cover crop and don't weed. Your soil will be better, you will use less water, and there's no downside.
>(and snails)
Nothing about permaculture says you can't deal with snails. You can still deal with snails/slugs however you like. The obvious being simple copper wire or beer traps.
>Are you telling me, that you don't have to do weeding, like OP said, at all?
Correct. The only plants I pull out of the ground are root vegetables.
>So not in the protected greenhouse, but out in the open gardens, where there are seeds coming from everywhere?
Yes. Again, seeds coming from everywhere doesn't matter, because a dandelion in your potatoes doesn't hurt anything.
If they do no harm, why do you want to spend time removing them?
I agree wholeheartedly. If. Unfortunately, if I ignore the thistles and many of the other unwanted plants, they will outcompete the plants I do want and completely overwhelm them. I'm not a big fan of doing unnecessary work. I know from experience that if I don't weed, I get almost zero yield. Squashes and potatoes are the only plants I have that survived.
OTOH, a few minutes here and there spent weeding (get them while they're small) and I get more veggies than I can eat.
This year I'm experimenting with using discarded heavy plastic bags as mulch to suppress the weeds. I'll see how that goes.
Was at a vineyard in Napa a couple weeks ago and they had a very diverse garden on display. One of the signs pointed out the type of weeds that grew there but referred to them as "volunteer plants" I got a kick out of that.
If it's a possibility, you may want to look into ducks for your snail problem. The ducks will keep the snail population low enough that it won't be a problem.
Ducks will also drill you nice little holes after they've eaten your green plants, so anyone who says just get ducks isn't telling the entire truth. Same with chickens. Same with guineas. Same with turkeys. Same with geese.
They'll always eat part of your harvest.
Side-note, duck eggs are great for baked goods. Nice, fluffy cakes and brownies. But fried they're a little gross.
You can't generalize "ducks". Different breeds behave very differently. The problem is someone saying "get ducks", rather than "get runners", so someone goes and gets whatever random ducks they find and of course they eat the garden. Or getting ducks and not having a pond even!
I honestly don't know, all my info has come from the internet. I use a pond, hugels and cover crop to skip watering. I don't till because tilling is simply harmful, you don't need to do anything to skip that. I use a cover crop of white clover and bugleweed to keep the soil from eroding away, keep the soil full of roots and thus bacteria, and to keep the moisture in the soil instead of having it evaporate off. Bare earth is really terrible, but everyone has learned through osmosis that gardens are supposed to look bare. In the fall after harvesting I spread the composted manure from the goats, rabbits and chickens on the garden beds. That's pretty much it. The biggest difficulty in gardening is planning (how much to plant of which things at what times), not actual work.
