Weeding? You Might Want to Save Those

I feel like everyone is eating wild weeds these days so I’m not going to go into a diatribe about eating your freshly pulled weeds. I want to tell you about how much young trees cost. They cost a stinking lot! A quick search on Google shows that typical prices run from $30 to $80, more for something unique or big.

I’m always pulling up young tree starts, Ash, Locust, Elm, Aspen, Box Elder, and Cottonwood love to take root in my garden and my lawn. With this in mind my husband and I are looking to buy some land but cheap land is often treeless land or has some need for shade or an area that needs to be blocked from view. I’ve calculated out trees on a few properties we’ve considered and to fill it out nicely it could cost at least a few grand.

But here I am throwing away all these young plants because they just don’t belong in my garden! Jerome Osentowski, from the Colorado Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute, one of my wonderful Permaculture professors, and a elder in the community, showed us this trick. You pull them and pot them and after a few years of watering and mulching you have yourself a nice sized tree to sell. So I’ve started a nursery just by pulling my weeds. I’m not much of a sales woman so I doubt I’ll sell many but they’ll work great on any property we might find in the future.

And it doesn’t just work on trees! I’m doing it with my overgrown Lavender and Salvia too! So soon I’ll have some new shrubs to plant.

Have fun finding another purpose for your throw-aways.

XO
JayJay

PS… Check out Jerome’s book, The Forest Garden Greenhouse.