By caring for your garden, you can add beauty to your outdoor aesthetic and keep your flowers, fruit, and veggies looking healthy. However, excessive water and synthetic chemicals can be very unhealthy and unsafe for the environment.
In this article, we will share tips that will help you maintain a lovely garden while positively impacting the environment.
What is eco-friendly garden care?
Eco-friendly garden care is a great way to keep your yard and plants healthy and flourishing without negatively affecting the environment.
For instance, using a lot of fertiliser to further improve the appearance of your lush-looking garden isn’t an environmentally friendly way of caring for your garden. Adding compost manure to your plant to add nutrients essential for its growth is eco-friendly garden care.
What is the importance of eco-friendly garden care?
Having a garden is highly beneficial. It enhances the aeration and drainage of soil as well as the quality of the air. However, some garden care techniques are not friendly to our environment.
Here are some benefits of using eco-friendly garden care approaches:
Preserve Biodiversity
When you care for your garden using eco-friendly techniques, you protect the health of your local ecosystem. The fact is that traditional gardening care techniques usually use herbicides and pesticides that are dangerous to moths, butterflies, birds, and other pollinators.
This is why you need to adopt eco-friendly alternatives, as they can nurture an environment that allows wildlife to thrive.
Lower Carbon Footprint
Traditional garden care approaches usually demand the use of excess water and energy. However, by using eco-friendly options like composting, mulching, and rainwater collection, you can tremendously lower the carbon footprint of your garden. This can be very cost-saving.
Soil Health
The use of pesticides and fertilisers can negatively impact the soil in the long run. Eco-friendly garden care techniques encourage the growth of quality soil through the use of mulching, organic matter, and composting.
Unhealthy soil will lead to poor yields and impact your garden’s aesthetics, causing your plants to deteriorate.
Thus, we recommend the use of eco-friendly gardening care techniques for quality soil health and growth.
Water Conservation
Water scarcity is a major problem in a lot of places. The goal of eco-friendly garden care is to curb water waste through techniques like planting drought-tolerant plants, mulching, and rainwater harvesting. This is good for water conservation as well as preventing soil degradation.
Eco-friendly Garden Care techniques
Proper use of fertiliser
Excessive use of fertilisers can cause nutrient pollution, which occurs when phosphorus and nitrogen wash away into streams, lakes, and other water sources. This can cause serious health concerns for humans and other living organisms.
Here are some helpful strategies to help you use fertiliser appropriately:
- Use fertiliser at specific months to lower the likelihood of its content being washed away.
- Ensure proper usage of fertiliser after testing your soil.
- Replace your synthetic fertilisers with organic alternatives to safeguard water and biodiversity.
Eco-friendly Landscaping
When adding landscaping features, opt for eco-friendly products like composite fencing panels, pergolas with untreated, locally sourced red cedar, bamboo pots, or recycled ceramic gravel. These items have a minimal impact on the environment.
Limit the Use of Pesticide
Rainwater and irrigation can wash away pesticides, and they can end up polluting oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, estuaries, and wetlands. Thus, you will need to limit the use of pesticides and adopt integrated pest management.
Integrated pest management is an ecosystem intervention system that eliminates pests via biological and cultural techniques. The goal of this type of pest management is to lower the population of pests and safeguard the health of humans and other living organisms.
Here are some strategies that can help you control pests and enhance your garden’s health:
- When necessary, selectively treat only infected plants in your garden.
- Use nectar and pollen as sources of food for pollinators.
- Get rid of debris, such as twigs and branches, to make your garden less attractive to pests.
- Switch to organic garden treatments
- Check for eco-friendly alternatives to your pesticide or fertiliser. This is helpful as they are non-toxic and decompose quickly compared to their synthetic alternatives.
Practice Mulching
With mulching, you can help improve soil moisture, control weeds, and prevent erosion. You can add organic materials such as wood chips, chopped leaves, sawdust, and compost to your soil surface to improve its nutrients.
Other eco-friendly garden care tips include:
- Improve the curb appeal of your garden by keeping an area with a wide variety of native flowering plants, shrubs, and ferns.
- Harvest rainwater using a barrel or conserve water via drip irrigation.
- Grow and maintain a clover lawn. It is a drought-resistant, low-maintenance option to traditional grass.
