compost

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Heather Jo Flores Tips for cloudy skies tomato gardeners In a foggy, temperate climate, most of us know the drill: Start seeds indoors in early spring and use grow lights if you have ’em. Plant in fertile soil with plenty of space in mid-June. Trellis, water, prune and pray and maybe, just maybe, get some ripened homegrown tomatoes before the rains come again in September, when what started out as a savory dream of salsa and gazpacho turns into six pounds of green tomatoes topped with powdery mildew and hopeful plans for next year. But there’s hope! Tomatoes are…

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Heather Jo Flores a little ingenuity goes a long way If you’re a gardener and you feel like melons are easy to grow, please, message me! I want to learn your methods. I have found this crop to be one of the most challenging of annual vegetables. If it were anything else, I’d probably have given up by now. But nothing can replace the sweet sticky pleasure of a summer afternoon spent eating a perfectly ripe garden-fresh melon. I tried a dozen different varieties of melons, and grew them in twice as many ways, and sometimes all I got was…

Permaculture Womens Guild

There are plenty of good reasons to develop a skill set for growing food in small spaces. By Heather Jo Flores There are plenty of good reasons to develop a skill set for growing food in small spaces. Maybe you only have a tiny balcony with sun for half the day? Or a hot, paved driveway but no other yard? Perhaps you’re in student housing? Or maybe it’s more of a time constraint: You’d like to have an expansive garden but you really only want to work on it for an hour a week. Or perhaps you just don’t really eat…

Permaculture Womens Guild

A baker’s dozen of easy to grow and disease-resistant perennial hedge plants. By Heather Jo Flores No garden is complete without a yummy patch of edible, perennial shrubbery! Even a small garden can squeeze in a few brambles, berries or ‘chokes. To create a low-maintenance food forest with a year-round harvest and multiple layers of plants, a mid-sized perennial understory is an essential piece of the design. Shrubs connect the canopy to the ground and create habitats for birds and insects. The shrub layer also shelters smaller plants and creates boundaries and microclimates. ​I picked a baker’s dozen of the best…

Permaculture Womens Guild

group plants together for specific reasons, encourage them to spread into permanent, self-managing landscapes

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Heather Jo Flores It’s always a good day for mulching your garden! Mulch builds humus. The word “human” comes from the same roots as humus, meaning earth, and in fact our bodies do contain many of the same elements and microorganisms as fertile organic soil. Soil health is linked to our own health, and soil communities bear remarkable resemblance to the flora and fauna in our own guts. A diverse, thriving intestinal community keeps us humans healthy, and the same goes for the soil ecosystem. The Benefits of Mulch ​A layer of mulch, whether up around perennials and fruit trees or…

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Karryn Olson Often, after an in-depth permaculture learning experience, folks emerge with the desire to change their living or working situations so that they can make a bigger difference in the world. I’ve identified some common mistakes that can be detours or even obstacles on this path towards a right livelihood, and I’m sharing them in the hopes you can avoid them and instead, fast-track regenerative solutions. Mistake #1: Permavangelizing People are attracted to permaculture for different reasons. Some even “fall in love” with it. Have you? Why? Or why not? Here are some of the reasons I was super…