Insight into the garden
There are at least about a hundred species of weeds in Dutch gardens, the most notorious and most persistent of which are ground elder, horsetail and locust bindweed. All three have such strong roots that it is almost impossible to weed them. The type of weed in your garden says a lot about the soil and its quality. For example, if you suffer from horsetail, it means that the garden has a shortage of minerals. So work to do if you want to improve this.

Other weed facts: nettles and ground elder grow in nutrient-rich soil, coltsfoot prefers soil with a poor structure and cleavers loves nitrogen-rich soil.

Making fertilizer from weeds
It may sound crazy, but you can make manure from weeds and let the garden benefit from it. Please note: we are not talking about the whole piece of weeds, because you cannot use the seed in flowers, the flower buds and the roots. The stems and leaves do, because they contain minerals such as manganese, magnesium, iron and copper. These are very valuable for the garden.

You can shred the stems on the compost heap or make liquid fertilizer from them. The latter is also called slurry and is much faster and easier to make than compost. To do this, you let the pieces of weeds rot in a container of rainwater and pour this into the garden plants. Pot plants especially love this.