Wild Rose Traps

I have been warned so many times about not having Multiflora roses here, that I need to pull them all up.  But I decided to leave most, specifically the big healthy ones.  Not only do they produce an abundance of flowers and hips for me and the insects, but they are a wonderful trap plant.

These plants can take a beating every year from Japanese beetles and who knows what else.  Some look gorgeous, but some poor rose bushes I wonder how they make it.  But they do.  They can grow 2 - 6 feet per year vigorously.  They take the damage that would otherwise be done to other plants and they take it on powerfully.

Our experience with Permaculture

      Here is my presentation from the Sustainability Festival on the 20th ..... Something I forgot to say and would like to add. When you first start out not mowing and you aren't used to it, it's going to look a bit like the beginning phase of a beard.  Rough and scraggly,  just hold on.  It's going to be a colorful ride.   (P.S.  I have no idea why blogger is making the font big in some places and small in others?)

From: http://www.permacultureglobal.com/posts/394

Picture in your mind the Garden of Eden - a paradise.  I imagine an ancient place dripping with fruit and nuts, food at my finger tips and I don’t imagine a place where people are slaving away.  It’s what we dream of, but gardening the common way is so labor intensive and expensive.   Much of the time and effort is spent adjusting for our poor Earth stewardship.  When I think of paradise, I never think about acres and acres of mowed monochromatic grass.  Imagine a garden that each generation in a family can build on for the next and the quality of life and land value for each generation is improved.  

      When I started gardening, I did it the way we were all taught.  I tilled, planted annuals in a row using crop rotation, hoed, watered a lot, fertilized, sprayed for bugs, weeded and started over the next year.  When we started out as organic gardeners none of that changed.   Then I started learning about permaculture and was hooked.   Permaculture isn’t a new way of gardening, it’s the oldest way.