Why do weeds grow so easily?
Several reasons. 1) Our crop plants have been bred for the traits of being tasty and having large amounts of energy rich material in their bodies. The wild ancestors of our food crops were almost all much smaller plants and contained large amounts poisons to discourage animals from eating them. We bred them to be larger and to have no toxins so that we could eat them easily. That also makes it easy for insect pests to eat them. However things like carrotweed and onionweed for example still retain the properties of the wild forms of carrots and onions and they are very good (or bad) weeds. 2) Wild plants, even weeds, don’t grow in large concentrations. You might only get a patch of wild plants a few metres across, or else the plants will be scattered with only one growing every few metres. That dispersal makes it much harder for insects to find wild plants they want to eat. We plant our crops in high density and high concentration which attracts the attention of insect pests and makes t
