What do weeds indicate about your soil?

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Heather Jo Flores What Weeds Indicate About the Condition of Your Soil “Weeds are weeds only from our human egotistical point of view, because they grow where we do not want them. In nature, however, they play an important and interesting role. They resist conditions that cultivated plants cannot resist, such as drought, acid soil, lack of humus, mineral deficiencies, as well as a one-sidedness of minerals, etc. They are witness of man’s failure to master the soil, and they grow abundantly wherever man has ‘missed the train’ — they only indicate our errors and nature’s corrections. Weeds want to tell a…

Marigolds as a Companion Plant

Permaculture Womens Guild

Why you should be growing marigolds in your permaculture garden By Heather Jo Flores What do you think of when you hear the word marigold? Maybe you imagine those 6-inch-high borders of orange and yellow flowers that your grandmother planted around her rose beds. Did she buy them by the flat, already blooming? Maybe she knew they helped repel insects from the roses. Or maybe she just liked the fact that they were so easy to grow, drought tolerant and cold-hardy, blooming late into the fall, hanging tough through heavy rains to cheer up even the soggiest gardener. When I…