Acting to Protect Our Planet Home
Tips for Sustainable Landscaping and Gardening
Growing your own fruits and vegetables, flowers, shrubs, and trees can be such a rewarding and healthy part of homeownership. If you are striving toward green homeownership, being sustainable while landscaping and gardening is an excellent place to start. Of the 29 billion gallons of water used daily by households, 9 billion is used outside, mainly for landscape irrigation. Some sustainable landscape solutions include watering by hand, since automatic irrigation systems can use 50% more water. Faulty, leaky automatic irrigation systems can waste even more water. Here are some quick tips for saving water outside:
- Water early in the morning. Experts estimate that 50% of water that is used outside is wasted through evaporation, wind, and runoff.
- Step on your lawn. Grass does not always need water just because it’s hot out. Step on it — if the grass springs back, it doesn’t need water.
- Leave grass longer. Longer grass helps grow deeper roots, resulting in a more drought-resistant lawn, reduced evaporation, and less weeds. Plus, longer grass tends to look more green naturally.
- Sweep instead of hose. Sweep sidewalks, steps, and driveways instead of hosing them off.
- Choose native plants. Native plants are wildlife- and pollinator-friendly, are more adaptable to the climate (therefore saving water), can help reduce the use of pesticides and fertilizers, are low-maintenance, and can cut lawn care costs.
Composting is another wonderful way to help your garden thrive while following a reduce, reuse, and recycle lifestyle. By using organic items such as twigs, grass, and certain food scraps for compost, you can create rich, nutritious, and naturally pest-resistant soil. Here are some additional resources to help you save water outside, begin composting, and make your lawn and garden more eco-friendly:
- 10 Tips for Outdoor Water Conservation by Regional Water Providers Consortium
- 7 Tips for Saving Water in Your Landscape by American Society of Landscape Architects
- Landscaping Water Conservation by Energy.gov
- 25 Ways to Conserve Water in Your Garden and Landscape by HGTV
- Composting at Home by the Environmental Protection Agency
- What to Plant by the Environmental Protection Agency
- Why Native Plants Matter by Audubon
- Native Plant Finder by National Wildlife Foundation
How To Turn Your Garden Into A Carbon Sink
Turning your garden into a carbon sink isn’t just about adding lots of trees.
During World War Two, the UK ministry of agriculture encouraged gardeners to "Dig for Victory" and grow their own vegetables to help feed the country. Allotments sprung up in private gardens and public parks – even the lawns outside the Tower of London were transformed into vegetable patches.
Almost 100 years later, the "Dig for Victory" slogan has been repurposed by the UK's Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). The gardening charity aimed to mobilise the biggest gardening army since World War Two to fight the biggest threat of the 21st Century: climate change. The tools at their disposal? Planting trees, using rainwater instead of sprinklers, and making compost.
If every one of the UK's 30 million gardeners planted one medium-sized tree and let it grow to maturity, they would store the same amount of carbon as is produced by driving 284 billion miles (457 billion km), 11 million times around the planet, research by the RHS shows. If every gardener produced 190kg of compost each year, they would save the amount of carbon produced by heating half a million homes for a year.
As governments and companies race to slash their emissions, there is increasing interest in the ability of natural landscapes, such as forests, wetlands and mangroves, to protect against the risks posed by climate change. Horticulturalists say the humble garden can also serve as a powerful tool in this fight.
"Gardens are becoming shop windows for the wider environment, demonstrating the dangers of pests and threats of climate change and showing what can be done to tackle it," says Simon Toomer, curator of living collections at Kew Gardens in the UK.
To cope with climate change, gardens must become more resilient to hotter and drier conditions in the summer and more rainfall in the winter, the RHS warns.
The ideal low-carbon garden has a wildness to it. It is packed with plants and teeming with life. The gardener in this sustainable haven is equally mindful of nurturing life below the ground as she is of tending to her flower displays and shrubs. She recycles every grass clipping, fallen leaf and broken twig within the garden and avoids toxic chemicals to boost plant growth, relying instead on home-made compost and living mulch to create a thriving habitat.
Wild lawns
"In the past everyone wanted a pristine lawn, but now there's a big movement in gardening for more natural landscapes which is really quite exciting," says Justin Moat, senior research leader on Kew Gardens' Nature Unlocked programme, which explores nature-based solutions to climate change and food security.
(To see this full article in the BBC, click on the link button on the right above)