Popular Permaculture Articles

Permaculture Womens Guild

So you want to turn your lawn into a front yard garden? Here’s how to stay friends with the neighbors.

Permaculture Womens Guild

they’re easier to build than you might think By Heather Jo Flores Ten reasons to build a greenhouse: Start seeds early (and late!) Many seeds need warmth to germinate and develop into healthy seedlings. If the growing season is short, getting ahead can make a big difference.​Protect tender perennials and grow exotic plants. Increase your yields by extending the range of plants you can grow in your climate!​Protect early blooming fruits (like apricot) from heavy rains. Flowers on fruit trees are often quite delicate and can be damaged by rain, wind or frost, resulting in big losses to your fruit crop…

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…

Permaculture Womens Guild

For people who have their own yard, starting a garden is easy. But for those who don’t have easy access to land, starting a garden takes a little more effort.

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…