horsetail

As you can see, this photo is more than worth the black border. Haven't been in the garden for a few weeks with this as a result; everything overgrown with horsetail or loosestrife as you call it popularly.

Horsetail is a signal plant, ie it only occurs on poor soils. Poor in the sense of mineral poor soils. Every living thing needs 60 minerals in certain balance to thrive. So if you miss this one in your garden, horsetail is the first pioneer to settle there and it's damn hard to get rid of. When you pull the plant out of the ground, it snaps just above the root and a few days later there is another cheerful stem above the ground. Let alone if you go wild with the hoe, the roots will also break into pieces and each piece will sprout again. They are also reasonably resistant to chemical control (spraying with poison), but that is not an option for me anyway because I don't want poison in my garden. Besides that by spraying, the soil life also dies and the horsetail comes back twice as much.

History

Horsetail is a very old plant, it grew before the dinosaurs. Then there were many species of Equisetum as they are called in Latin, even specimens that grew underwater in swamps to whole trees. It is these trees that formed the coal seams that we know today.

The Solution

Is there no permanent solution against horsetail at all? Certainly! Only it is a slow solution as everything in nature goes slowly. The reason hermus grows is that the soil is poor, so I have to enrich it with lava flour or grit. There is a remedy on the market that is called horsetail-min and this is based on lava meal and worm manure with plant hormones and a little long-acting lime. I also want to enrich my garden with bird guano, this is specific pelican manure, a long-acting fertilizer that will slowly transform my garden into a fertile oasis. But first pluck all horsetail and other weeds from my garden then sprinkle lava flour together with horsetail-min especially the latter in the planters and bird guano. Because this will be a very slow process, it will take at least three years before my garden will be free of horsetail, but that this will happen is certain. This photo shows the beginning of the end of the horsetail era in my vegetable garden! I'll keep you informed!