Sustainable Gardening: It’s All The Rage!

Compost

Composting has the most impact of any sustainable gardening practice. Composting recycles and enriches. It benefits the health of your soil and benefits your family at the same time. Composting yard and garden wastes means less material going to the landfill and more organic material for your soil. Composting can be as simple as raking leaves over your garden when you put it to winter bed or as specific as indoor food composting with a Bokashi bucket or worm bins. Whether you’re growing vegetables, lawns, flowers and shrubs or fruit trees, composting will bring about vibrant, fortifying change to your gardens while it reduces waste. Composting practices which make soils more friable also help to conserve water. The planting of green manures — cover crops like rye, oats and hairy vetch that are composted directly into soils — add nitrogen and other nutrients and also help prevent erosion during spring and fall runoff.

Maze Two Stage Compost Tumbler - 65 Gallons

Maintenance Techniques

How you care for your garden goes a long way towards attaining sustainability. Age-old practices like cultivating between plants with a long hoe not only suppresses weeds but aerates your soil. Avoid using chemical herbicides and toxic pesticides that extract a toll on the environment and you. Instead follow organic weed and pest control methods. There’s both health and knowledge benefits to getting down on your knees and pulling weeds. Using beneficial insects to control pests not only benefits your garden, it can become a valuable lesson in natural science for your children.

Grow Native, Climate-Appropriate Plants

Nature has designed the perfect plant for your micro-climate: the one that is native to your area. Check natural areas and local garden experts for plants that thrive in your conditions. Find plants that, depending on your conditions, tolerate drought, or high rainfall and seasonal flooding. Exposed environments may need plants that tolerate high winds. When growing vegetables, you already choose plants that mature during your area’s growing season. Making sure vegetables are hardy and high-yielding inside all your area’s climatic, prevailing soil and elevation conditions means you use less soil additives and supplements, less water and less overall effort to see them succeed.

Save Seed

Seed saving brings you more in-tune with your plants and assures that the seed you’ll plant next season has done well this season. Start with the easiest seeds to save: peas, beans, peppers, tomatoes and work from there. Harvest flower seed taken from dried flowers. Scout fields and woodlands for harvest-able native plants and grasses. Learn to identify weeds and invasive plants to prevent accidentally importing them to your landscape. Few experiences are as gratifying as watching seed you grew, harvested and cured, sprout the following season.

Garden Design

When sustainable gardeners design their gardens and landscapes, they consider all resource-conserving principles to protect their soil and plants. Just as American farmers worked to end the Dust Bowl by planting shelter belts and by practicing contour farming, the sustainable gardener utilizes the same soil-protective, crop-rotating, water-conserving practices to achieve minimal impact. When building walks, walls or decks, the sustainable gardener looks for recycled, environmentally-friendly building materials; likewise when building soils. And there’s a ripple effect when you buy sustainable, organic products from businesses that support sustainable gardening. Their success — and yours — encourages more gardeners to follow the path of sustainability even as it immediately rewards the environment.

Sustainable design considers where plants are placed. Shade-loving plants are placed in the shadow of tall sun-loving plants, sun-loving plants are planted in places with the best exposure to light. Water-loving plants are grown where moisture collects, trailing plants are grown over terraces. Companion planting is an easy way to control pests and encourage growth. The more knowledge one has about plants and gardening, the better one’s landscape design.

Conserving Water Resources

Water is precious. It needs to be protected for quality as well as preserved. The sustainable gardener will utilize rain barrels and collection systems to provide water not taken from the draw-down of dwindling municipal or private sources. The sustainable gardener protects water quality by not using herbicides or pesticides that might contaminate it as it percolates through the soil and heads back to the water supply. Water that drains away or ends up in a storm sewer is wasted. Sustainable gardeners control runoff with permeable soils. They use mulch and ground covers to enable soils to hold water, so it does not evaporate or drain away quickly. They design “rain gardens,” utilizing terraces, holding pools and raised beds to collect rainwater, allowing it to soak slowly back into the soil.

The goal is to use only the water nature provides, in the form of rain and runoff, achieved by harvesting it and storing it until needed. This is easier in some locations than others. Where rainwater collection is difficult or impossible, the sustainable gardener uses direct water methods — a watering can — or some form of drip or direct irrigation to cut down on evaporation loss. Sprinkling systems are wasteful (through evaporation) and most plants, excluding ferns and other humidity lovers, don’t do as well watered with sprinklers.

Rain Wizard 50 Gallon Barrel with Diverter Kit Included

Last, Not Least

These principles, taken together, encompass uncountable methods and techniques that move gardeners that much closer to sustainability. I encourage you to explore the links here and all other sources — including your local gardening experts — to increase what you know about plants, soil and resource conservation. The greatest tool you can use to pursue the goal of sustainability is knowledge. And the largest effect you can have on sustainability is to share that knowledge. That’s a big part of making gardens and landscapes sustainable: passing on what you know.