weeds.

I think pictures of weeds help to make them look desirable and i can put in information on some of the weeds i hang a photo of.  The photos I am going to post are not going to be about all wild flowers but about weeds in my garden or on pasture lands.

I like weeds i find a lot of them pretty or atmospheric or interesting to look at, and they are healthy and keeping them contributes to biodiversity. It is part of permaculture to have a lot of different plants as well as your food plants, you never know what place they might not have in the health of the soil and helping the health of the plants next to them, as companion plants. 
the first photo is --- I dont have the book that has the information on this plant here in madrid so i will have to include the name later . in the first photo this plant has a few basal leaves which is what it looks like in winter, later on it shoots and flowers.
     The leaves are edible they taste a bit like garlic but are bitterer. I use them fried to flavour omlettes and scrambled eggs, they are very good like this. I would try them with prawns and such too. I never cook sea food up there though.
    There are some ladies on you tube who preserved curry leaves by laying them on a tray and leaving them to cold dry in the fridge for four days maybe that method would work to preserve these leaves. 

    Maybe i have usefull plants in my garden because it is a garden and people used to eat these plant,s i have the plant that is good for head aches just by the back door. 
     
        The first phot is aliaria pètiolata i have got out all my books and looked it up.  I  have another photo of thi splant later in th esummer when it is begining to die back after flowering.

  the forth piccture is of a group of aliaria next to my box they increase the attractivenes of this corner of the garden by my standards.
    That is a box i constructed that i use to protecct new plants from the sun and excessive drying out with shade cloth  over the box i also keep some cutting there  till autumn when i plant them out.

       You can see the foot of the seriouse bit of mountain behind the village at the top of the photo, The bottom part of the mountainside covered with cistus plants one of the parts that you can see in the veiw of the village. agri rose macaskie.

   Ths is a photo of lambs lettuce, as crispy critter say below it is lambs quarters not lambs lettuce, which can be eaten like spinach. I have to take more photos of this plant when it shoots. It is said to be very good as spinach, what grows in my garden is not nearly enough to get a good  plate of spinach.
    One lady on internet says that if it is well fertilised it grows very big.
    My neighbors here in Spain say they feed it to sheep and goats when they have broken legs it helps their legs to set. agri rose macaskie.

I love weeds!  I wish we even had weeds growing now, it is so dry, even weeds won't grow without irrigation. 

We are having a very wet early summer i long to see how everything is gettign on with all the heat and rain. Come august a lot of my weeds will be dry. NO the big ones stay all through the drought i have verbasums theyn are garden flowers in England byuut they are weeds here and they flower all through the summer nearly but they are very tall and i suppose their roots go down a long way. THe verbasum grow a rosette of basal roots for a year and then sends up its enormouse stem in the second and last year of its life.
 
      This is a weed whose leaves grow in a way that remind me of late paintings by Matisse. here it is quite small it doubles in height. It has small flowers like a dandy lion flower and ditto dandylion type seed heads.
        I looked up the weeds mentioned by Cocannouer as very usefull weeds with deep roots and this or a near relation to this weed was one of the weeds he mentions as specially usefull . H etells of how usefull weeds are beause their roots are deep and brign up nutrients from deep levels of soil that get left  on top of the soil when they die.
  I have to look up the name of this weed too.
   My slope is very steep i have made terrrace like swales in it but it is too steep for a proper wide swale.

  thi sphoto is of my very steep slope that i have now put some terraces on as it is to steep to have a ful scale  swale and berm. .
    THere is a burdock plant out of focus middle right of th epoocture burdock has long roots that are edible and good i have just read it up in google and aapparently its stems are also edible scraped and boiled and it leaves are edible in is eaten more in asia than in europe though . it burs whihc are its seed cases are very annoying they stick tightly to dog hair or human hair. I fyou start to eat the root you soon stop having so many burdocks.  agri rose macaskie.

H ludi tyler. Do you mean weeds wont even grow in winter without irrigation, that is tremendouse, what a pity. rose.

rose macaskie wrote:
   Ths is a photo of lambs lettuce which can be eaten like spinach. I have to take more photos of this plant when it shoots. It is said to be very good as spinach, wha tgrows in my garden is not nearly enough to get a good  plate of spinach.
    One lady on internet says that if it is well fertilised it grows very big.
    My neighbors here in Spain say they feed it to sheep and goats when they have broken legs it helps their legs to set. agri rose macaskie.

Lambs lettuce/fathen leaves are also good in ramen and soups. My biggest so far were about 170-180 cm tall.

        A lambs lettuce that grows tall must have long roots too that are doing wonders for the soil.
      I only realised they were edible and good last year and started to think of trying to make sure they grew in greater numbers but my husband cut them before they seeded so i could not collect seed this year i will ask for htem to be left uncut, last year i was just hoping for the  in sterad of cordoning them off or some such. 

     1.  This is a verbascum pulveralentum, this one is not growing in my garden but some mile or so down the road, which means up the mountain  they are called gordo lobos here, fat wolves. I like them in the garden they are human size or a bit bigger and so growing in the grass under the apple trees they have a ghostly presence.
      They grow a rosette of basal leaves on the first year, they are bienials as far as i can make out, and then send up these big shoots the second year. It seems to me they must have very deep roots that bring up the mutrients in the subsoil and by digging through it and by leaving the dead roots behind in the soil, they must start to condition new levels of soil so that plants with a less strong growth can later use deeper levels of soil and so that more water is accumulated in your soil. Organic matter absorbes and retains water, iso more organic material at different depths of your soil more retention of water.

  2. Here are the verbascum under my apple trees, i think the deeper yellow flower is hypericum a plant which also can be planted as a garden plant not a weed in England here is is a protected weed and not very pretty in the garden.  The deep rooted weeds stay green way into the dry season.
I put a lot of sticks under the tree the deer dont like walking through a mountain of sticks and they work as a mulch a rather airtey mulch they must give some shade to the ground at any rate. There is a hazel tree on the right, the deer did clean their anklers on that and now it is not very well, has one type of fungi or another. 
  3. Here is a photo of the basal rosette of the verbascum it is what appears the year before the flower spike grows. 

    Feilds full of wild flowers change with the seasons, in spring this will look very different, the verbascum and the hirpericum where not grown last time i was in the garden three weeks ago in may but there was wild geranium everywhere and the horses celery,  i have to look for the latin name of that, that find really pretty was growing  in the grass.
     I have not seen verbiscum under the apple tree this year, maybe my husband has done something to them, how can married people ever carry out experiments, like seeing how well weeeds better the soil. These plants must have a long root to grow so big, if the area is full of them just imagine how deeply the soil is gettign turned into deep top soil.
  4. I  have put in a picture of the the dark yellow flower of the photo of verbascum under the apple trees. agri rose macaskie.

  H Ludi Tyler, May be your lack of weeds are not so much due to the rainfall as to a lack of nutrient in the soil look at this bit of ground in the next viillage down from me, the rain fall must be about the same it is a bit down mountain from me but nothing is growing here.
      I put the lack of plants in many plcaes down to the fact that if you overgraze plants down into the ground, so they can't recover then you have no plants in the soil and no organic matter which rotting produces nitrogen in a from plants can take up and so if you do for plants you get soils with no nitrogen in them incapable of growing plants because there are no nutrients for plants not because there is too little water.
      I find these mediteranean soil covered in stones so pretty.
       I saw a documentary about the UN trying to bring a bit more vegetation to the desert and they had fenced off part of the desert so camels could not get in and eat up all vegetation beyond recuperation point and they had a program of people going in to throw manure on the desert rather than to irrigate it and these to actions make me think that the UN too thought desert land are even more in need of nutrients than water. agri rose macaskie.

  This photo of the village my house is in will give a better idea of where the village of my garden is placed. At the top of the photo, the top of the mountain peak the Ocejon is covered in clouds.
The plants on thope behind the village are cistus plants and heather.
agri rose macaskie.

That's a very pretty view you have there Rose.  I would like to see some pictures of your garden if you are ever inclined to post them.  I lived in New Mexico for many years when I was first getting interested in gardening and I am familiar with the challenges of growing plants in a dry climate, although I did not know about permaculture then.

 Willly-k 
    Your lettñer is friendly but i am going to answer as if you criticised me for putting up photos of my things because i should think it is a criticism that will be leveled at me for putting up photos of my garden.
      I have just put up a lot of photos of my garden in the thread  "help for newbie improving weedy pasture.
      My garden is mostly what grows naturally  and the fruit trees the former owner planted to sell the property better, and what just grows there of its own accord  is the prettiest bit of the garden. Trees grass and weeds
     i used to have plenty of organic principals, a determination to let the soil recover and show how good the soil could be but being interested in organic and such brought me to this forum and permaculture and in permaculture you don't only have to have organic pricipals, like no chemicals for the soil, you are expected to grow food, so i am now tryiiing to grow food and that is a challenge in a country with a dry climate as annuals, most vegetables are annuals, just die in summmer here, which is to say in a dry season and reapear in autumn but most vegetables are likely to be producing in summer so they need watering, to reduce watering they must need even more organic matter in the soil than my trees or weeds and grass need.
         i have just posted a lot of pictures of the garden, it becomes relevant when youi write a lot about what you are doing, i am planting apple trees and i knowenglish people, for example, don't understand why i am not planting lemons which no one plants at a thousand metres above sea level here in spain or only a sepp holzer would plant.
         This photo is pretty but it is not what you see when you are in the village, it would be a nice veiw if you lived outside the village down the road. It does explain why the garden looks so green, maybe any part of Spain could look lush angd green if people did not so cut things down for fear of all that undergrowth tha twould be a mas of dry tinder in summer creating fires.
  i am going to upt up more pjhotos of the garden in this thread., the photos  in which you can see how pretty weeds are, as that seems to me to be the best attack on lawns. and weed killers. The above photos those that are a portrait of a weed, are of weeds in my garden. agri rose macaskie

im only able to see the pictures if i open the image in a new window.

I turned the ad block extensions off, any ideas?

Belizaire, i dont have a clue but there is a computer section or was i dont know if anyone ever reads it. Maybe you shoul dwrite to paul wheaton he must know a lot about computers i think he has a soft ware forum as well as this forum. agri rose macaskie.

Here is a picture of my garden in autumn i can't believe the grass is growing so strongly in autumn that is a mounth or twos growth of grass as apples are on the tree it must be autmn . the apples ripen late this must be the end of october aearly novenmber i probably have the date on the photo yo9u cant tell when the rains of sptember will come. it seems they were early this year.
I love long grass of course if you are walking in it ervery day it becomes flattened long grass which is not so pretty, you cant see it but there are violets in this grass that is i f i am remembering which apple tree this is i think i am not. The leaves and flowers of violets are good for salads.  agri rose macaskie.

  This is a picture of my garden in the summer heat. It is not the same bit of garden as that of the apple tree in long green grass but all the garden looks like this in the dry mounths of summer, covered in dry grass, plenty of tinder for a fire, you can see why vegetation is kept right down in Spain so this is not what you have to offer fires in summer.
  It is also a picture of chicory, i love chicory because we went to Greece for family holidays in my teens and they were very happy holidays and there was chicory plants on the over eaten ground under the olive trees. Where girls walked their geese and other such pastoral occupations existed.
    This plants leaves die down in summer but it flowers all through the summer mounths. Its blue flowers are out in the morning and die at midday and new flowers are out the next morning.
    It is the plant mentioned on the dandylion page about which there was some confusion some thinking chicory was danylion and vice a versa and i understand the confusion here in spain, because a shop i went to was selling danylion seeds i think it was as a salad plant and calling them chicory.
      This pplant of the picture is the wild version of the salad plant, i believe, it has a fair amount of leaves on the ground in spring before the plant shoots to produce a flower stalk. I am not very sure of that I must research it a bit.
      Its roots are dried and ground and used as a substitute for coffee. agri rose macaskie.

  Here is a photo of how much dry undergrowth you can have if you are not carefull in Spain in a bit of the road beside agricultural land, htis is summer as youi can see from the wheat feilds. 
  The drought here starts somewhere into July, and goes on untill somewhere into september. It usually rains fairly soon on entering into September, though the year my father saw my garden it had not rained in September either and everything looked horrible, he came in early october. That is July, August, with some or other sized bit of June and maybe of September.

     I post a photo of how dry another bit of my garden is in the height of summer, of grass with some sloe trees, which are weeds in my garden  if anything tha tcame up of its own accord that you did not plant is a weed. They are used in Spain to make a drink called Pacharan made with sloes steeped in a mixture of agua dente, fire water and marie brizard, the last a very sweet anise drink. I prefer sloe gin that is a bottle two thirds full of sloes filled up with gin and left till christmass time, buy shich time that juice has come out of the sloes into the gin. 
  The macerated berries macerated in gin, are good for curing slight diarrhea as well as to get drunk on. SLsoe gin comes out about hte same if you use vodka or anyother white drink the fire water without the anise drink.
    I reckon people might  buy sloes as they are something special that they dont sell in you local vegetable shop. They are a nuiscance to pick as they are small so its a lot of picking to each kilo of sloes which would not matter so much if i lived in the country all the time and so could do a bit of picking every day.
  i have put in a picture of my house and garden when i got it fifteen years before, the house is so pretty as it was without windows and such. It shows what the garden was like, how bare it was, i hope it rproves how usefull the weeds are as i thas become so lush during most of the year. agri rose macaskie.

sometimes somthing exotic appears in the grass like this flower.

 
  i am going to have to rewrite this tomorrow its seems to me this plant is the pimpinella saxifaraga.  I ohoepd this plant was a wild carrot becasue the flower has the central black flower that apparently a wild carrot has but it doe snot have the same leaves as wild carrot leaves the leaves look a bit like those o fthe pimpinel saifraga but the flower is different from tha tof this plant.
Someone wil maybe know what it is.
  i hoped to say it was a wild carrot because then as well as being a weed that is probaly good for the soil it is a good plant for insects too, maybe it is a good plant  for insects too having polen tha will sustain the benes, which is to say usefull insects.
So here is my portrait of this plant anyway, just for, "the weeds are atractive", arguement of this thread.
i have been looking at these plants now that they are out and i have totally messed up two plants here. O siu``pe o jus ttpopl `hotos and then just hopedthe ones near the village we¡here the same as the ones in my garden. i have a correction later on in this thread- agri rose macaskie.

     This is a picture of the leaf of this umbellifera. There is a yellow line around the leaf as it is lower dddown the stem  and i have drawn  an orange line around the last leaf of these compound leaves when its nearly at the tip of the stem and much longer than that of older leaves.  agri rose macaaskie.

rose macaskie wrote:
sometimes somthing exotic appears in the grass like this flower.

It looks like a salsify flower.

basjoos, If its a salsify flower I'm in luck.

This is a plant i find very attractive called, in spanish, horse parsley. It is spreading all round the garden. It was out last time i was there about three weeks ago. The decorative effeccts wild flower produce for you change from mounth to mounth. agri rose macaskie.

this is wild geranium wild geranium flowers and there leaves decorated the village its walls in th evillage i loved in Somerset England Mells and they are here too in this village and in my garden in Spain. agri rose macaskie.

This is a picture ofmany of the flowers shown above all together with each other and with an apple tree.
The second piture is of the solpe up to the house, it is taken looking in the opposite direction from the one of the first photo and  abit to the right of it.
There are brambles on the slope, i feel bad about taking out all the brambles as they provide cover for birds, i take out lots so as to be able to walk around and because i suddenly put in apple treesand a whitchazel that will make me soothing skin creams and who seeds are edible for the hens i may one day have, for example.  agri rose macaskie. 

Here is a picture of the side of a road down the way. with weeds and moss, and i have a picture of one peice of that moss upturned by me to show how soil grows under the moss.
Moss grows when its wet, it takes its moisture from the air and just goes dry and dead in dry weather and then resurges in the wet, so old layers of moss must provide plenty of organic matter for the new ones.
     I once picked a bit of moss of the wall of a bridge and rolled the earth under the ball between my fingers and it  had bits of sand in it and i wonder if it was because the wind and the rain carry dust that maybe gets washed through the moss and held under it.

  The next two are pictures of natural pastures, the plants that grow in them. I have started a collection of the plants that grow in the natural pastures around me when i am in the village. 
b these are the pastures that according to books and one person are kept if they start to get thin or sown on land left fallow byu taking the sheep over pastures with plants that are seedign and later taking the sheep and goats over the places they want to sow.  I hope this lasts, modern farming is taking over rapidly in Spain.
     The third picture is has a time bush in the centre of the photo. time covers many fields one village down from me and is usually eaten right down. 
  the forth i put in because of the little blue flower but it also features lavender bushes.
n the forth picture shows were the lavender and time bushes are just where the ground rises and the trees start wher ethe grose bushes are in flower  on the other side of the wheat feild.
    This is an agro sylvo pastural tradition where wheat grow on the land that have been flattened by centuries of ploughing land by the villag eand the rest of the land is given over to pasture and  junipers, this type of juniper the thurifera produces very hard beams. Once the beams and columns of all the houses around here and in much of Spain where made of juniper trunks and you dont have to wait for the tree to mature as the wood is hard the trunks serve as beams while they are still thinnish.  The herds of miced sheep and goats graze in the woods and every where else.  agri rose macaskie.

The picture of the place the last photos of weeds are from. The pasture lands start were the village wheat feilds stop where you see the yellow flowers of gorse bushes and are combined with juniper trees, of old used for the beams and pillars in all the houses, so good for construction material. This is the hard wooded juniper juniperus thurifera.
  I have writen about this agro sylvo pastoral tradition in the woodland care section under a thread i started on junipers.

rose macaskie wrote:
   Ths is a photo of lambs lettuce which can be eaten like spinach. I have to take more photos of this plant when it shoots. It is said to be very good as spinach, wha tgrows in my garden is not nearly enough to get a good  plate of spinach.
    One lady on internet says that if it is well fertilised it grows very big.
    My neighbors here in Spain say they feed it to sheep and goats when they have broken legs it helps their legs to set. agri rose macaskie.

The plant you identify as "lambs lettuce" here appears to be "lambs quarters" to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenopodium_album
I have lamb's quarters growing as a "weed" in my garden, but it is as good as Spinach (maybe better)
Last year I tried to get it to reseed and make more, but I don't see as much as last year. Maybe I need to actually collect the seed and store it over winter, then plant it by hand.

  you are right i have just looked up lambs lettuce it is what we call canionigos here. This is lambs quarters.
    Different members of the  chenopodium family  seem to often crop up everywhere when you are looking for forage plants. rose.

here is a photo of a wild pink. it is growing in the part of my garden that has always been pasture land while on th eohter side of the river the house side the land has always been vegetable gardens. I have often seen it in the wild here in SPain and i have sen it on the ground left fallow and used as pasture while it rests from wheat.
Other flowers in the same place. Sometimes flowers are small because they have been grazed or chopped by a lawn mower. I  have seen flower bigger than normal for that plant i¡on a manure heap.  agri rose macaskie.

Lamb's quarter (also known here as "Fat Hen") is a very useful weed.  Besides being used by humans as food, it makes a very nutritious feed for poultry.  Probably one of the most useful of the native weeds.

John polk, Last year i just hoped my husband would not cut the lambs quarter because he had not early on in the summer but he did, this year I only have one or two i shall be savign seed from them this year and give careful instructions on them in future.
ni keep not fighting so tha the only cuts the wild oats after they have dropped thre seed and so left much more food for the fauna. maybe next year i an fight for the fauna in this way. agri rose macaskie.

i have to rectify about my ccrazy photos of the umbellifera in my gardn which i got all wrong earlier in this thread. . one is this one with a in this case red flower in the centre of the cluster of flowers and in other cases are black. woth a photo of its leaf.
in th efirst photo you can see the centre flower that loooks like an insect and is red.
in the second photo you get a second shoot of the central flower.
  THe third photo is of the leaf of htis flower but it is hard to see if you can't blow up the photo a bit.

The other umbellifera whose leaves i show at the begining of this thread does not have this central flower. here are some more photos of its flower tha shows the attraction of amny flowers of this type of plant that whose flowers are often a little bit different in the centre and at the borders of the grop of flowers.