answering Brenda Groth's last, i am sort of found of weeds. the problem with the county mowing them is that they get destroyed, they don't have time to produce seed and you end up with so few varieties that they stop being interesting.
In rain gardens round the great lakes, designed to clean the run off
water from roofs and yards by running them through a area of plants and soil full of organic water so that the pathogens from dustbins and the petrol from the car parked in the yard get broken down by plants, fungi and microbes, in the earth of your rain garden instead of going straign into drains that lead to the lakes and so dirtying them . You can find out about these by tapping in "rain gardens", or chicago alleys. The instructions on growing a rain garden are to plant the
local weeds in thekm because they will survive the local climate. Here in Spain they have some pretty exotic weeds though which makes growing what comes up naturally more interesting.
If the soil has been really spoilt, which can happen in the most garden of eden tpe places, your weeds maybe the strongest things and best for producing organic matter with which to better your soil. The first priority is to just have something growing that will start putting vegetable matter in your soil. Just think of the
roots of the plants filling the soil every growing season and leaving vegetable matter in it as they die back in the off season, that may be a dry one or a cold one and the sight of plants will make you happy.
Tree and bush roots increase the bio mass in the soil, they increase the
carbon locked up in the soil and they probably work as natural hoglecultur syñstem when the tree dies and the roots eventually rot.
What has happend to Susanne Monroe she was a really good permie writer, i hope it was not what i said that scared her off, if she is an unwarlike, timid contributer.
Weeds don't cost anything which is a major factor for many people, and a factor that is hard to grasp for others. You can get organic matter for your soil by growing them without expense. Finding out which are eatable is amusing. But means buying books, not even that in the days of internet.
Chemical fertilisers are bad for the soil in great quantities but if your soil is exhausted, as many soils are here, put some on to get your roganic matter started later you wont need it, to much burns living things and then your weeds will produce much more organic matter that betters soils for you and buying fertilisers is cheaper than buying plants, that for me are prohibitive, especially as they die if i don't give them lots of water in summer until they are well established and it has taken me a while to learn to grow things from seed without the seedling rotting or drying out. I am still not there yet, there being, really efficient at growing things from seed.
I have only just started reading about the permaculture systems of canals and banks that help you grow things in dry climates.
b this year in the bottom part of the garden the grass didnot completely die down and so the weeds have in the end bettered the soil
enough for the grass to live through the dry season . I don't like lawns they aren't pretty but they are great for playing
games on.
Weeds with long roots can bring up nutrients from deeper parts of the soil and then when the plant dies back in winter or in the dry season or in both, those nutrients the plant has absorbed and placed in leaves and stalks fall back on the earth and when the plant decomposes return to the soil. Plants and animals like us are full of iron and calcium and such and if you take us off and bury us in cemeteries or feed plants to animals in other counties that iron calcium absorbed from our soil ends up in someone else's.
This is none of the problems with factory farming the feed is grown in one counjty and the animals feed in another, so the places were the feed is grown don't recieve, as they used to, with old fashioned farming, the plant passed through the gut of the animal. The plant matter grown on the land does not get returned to it. Agri
rose macaskie.
Some one here said that plants crops don't exhaust soils, that is not what traditional books on farming say, not permaculture books or organic books or anything odd of they type but traditional books on normal traditional chemical using farming. if you read them unless USA ones are really odd. Crops that are grown on your soil, cut and sold, so no part of them except the roots gets returned to the soil, exhaust soils.
Some weeds are invasive and hard to get rid of i don't know which ones but other people on this blog are good at that. My
answer to evasive plants is to find a use for them and they go away. I started eating my stinging
nettles and it gave them the ju ju and they disappeared, the same happened to the burdock whose roots i started to eat. One plant grew in my garden this year and i have collected the seed, to plant, so that i can eat plenty of burdock roots which are delicious. agri rose macaskie.
