Whitewashing is the act of minimizing or covering up vices, crimes or scandals, or of exonerating the guilty by means of a perfunctory investigation or biased presentation of data with the intention to improve someone's reputation.
Happy to help! And we're looking forward to seeing and hearing about your garden journey this year!
I think I can safely speak for folks here and say that we would love to see some pictures of your next collection trip!
Yes! The "check out" procedure is writing down what you took and promising to do your best to bring seeds back when you harvest so others can grow them too. Our library repurposed one of the old card catalogue drawer sections to organize the seeds. The whole thing is relatively small, and is on a mobile wheelchair accessible table. It's totally worth seeing if your nearby library would host it. Our local grocery store even donated packets this year.
Short answer: you can decompose your weeds in water without oxygen and retain non-oxidized phytonutrient forms to feed your plot. Put a lid on the bucket (it's stinky) and wait 3 or more weeks before distributing with water at 10 - 50:1 ratios.
Longer answer: in an oxygen rich environment, the nutrients held by the garden waste and weeds are acted upon by a certain set of decomposition organisms, resulting in oxidized forms of those nutrients, their base elements, or a compound resulting from those biological processes. Without that available oxygen, different organisms and processes take over and result in different forms of those nutrients. There is some oxidation occurring when you mix it for dilution or expose it to the air, but enough of that form of nutrient will become available to your plants and the subsoil community they support.
Why does that matter?
Soils are living entities teeming with absolute scads of life forms, and are in a state of constant change through processes like gas exchange, hydration, and the fluctuations of chemical signals from the plants and microbiology in the vicinity. When we fertilize, it's in our interests to feed as many forms of our nutrients to our plants as we can responsibly manage, since that variety of nutrition will benefit the subsoil communities that are the engine of the soils we're cultivating.
During periods of wet soils - whether due to a continued rain event or one big deluge that won't drain away - there are functional anaerobes that will continue working to provide gas exchange and nutrient harvesting for our plants, since the aerobic microorganisms are either dormant or dying. Even when these events aren't catastrophic, our plants can suffer from a lack of these services. It's possible to inoculate your soil with some of these organisms by incorporating anaerobic liquid fertilizers you've made yourself from the weeds you're pulling.
Since those weeds are often doing the work of sequestering scarce nutrients by drawing them from subsoils or by using overabundant ones to advance the succession of the plants, we can use their hard work (and sacrifice) to replenish those nutrients they're accumulating to the benefit of other plants we're intentionally growing. This is a hyper-localized fertilization method for the exact patch you're growing in, as dictated by what the soil is expressing from its latent seed bank.
I'm going to check out your write up for sure! What you shared last year might have contributed to how weirdly enthusiastically I accepted the seeds.
Sounds like you've got all the fixin's for some anaerobic fertilizer!
I love this with every fiber of my being, in part because I had to look up all of those plants! Can you tell us more about the native plant nursery you volunteer with, or how you go about locating and eco-sourcing the seeds?
I'd highly recommend checking out the work done and books authored by Martin Crawford for inspiration and details. In lieu of that, here are two pictures of tables from the appendices of Creating a Forest Garden:
Please note that not all of these are native to the region, which may or may not be a deal breaker for your goals
This was wicked cute
[Image description: an adolescent brown (chocolate) muscovy duck poses for a selfie with his walking food dispenser]
[Image description: a group of people, captioned "all the seeds I'm stratifying for spring", stand uncomfortably close around a woman seated on a couch who is captioned "the butter"]
[Image description: Buster Bluth proclaims he's a monstera, rather than a monster, because of the picture of a monstera superimposed on his head]
This is admittedly stupid but I laughed a bunch while making it
[Image description: a cartoon image of a translucent sheet draped over a potted plant, with text that says "the ghost of the plant I killed"]
[Image description: the Aurora borealis painted the night sky with streaks of red, purple, and green all the way down to the 43rd parallel this evening]
[Image description: four male Muscovy ducks resting in a row amid grasses and low forbs. One is a light brown with some white around his neck. Next to him is a white one with even lighter brown along his wings and on the top of his head. The third is a mottled gray boy with white highlights and a black head, while the fourth is black and green on his wings with a black head and white belly]
Which is probably a first for some of these folks