How to Make Your Garden More Sustainable?

If you’re thinking of ways to reduce your carbon footprint at home, the garden is a great place to start. People often think that because gardens are ‘green’ spaces that they’re automatically very sustainable, but this isn’t always the case.

As well as missing opportunities to reuse and recycle in the garden, a lot of homeowners also forget to think about the way their garden features are made & where they come from.

In today’s blog, I’m going to show you a few simple ways you can make your garden more sustainable, I hope that you’ll think about implementing one or two of these in the new year.

Shop sustainably

It’s very easy to head into your local hardware store and choose garden decking, and wood furniture that’s cheap and readily available, but when you look beneath the surface of these items, you realise they’re not very sustainable options at all.

Deforestation is a huge problem and many people don’t realise that the products they’re buying for their homes contribute to it. Think about the amount of wood that’s needed to create a single deck, somewhere in the region of 10 – 40 boards (depending on the size of your garden).

Now imagine that the boards you choose are made of tropical hardwood. In order to fulfill your order, the decking manufacturer has to cut down the tropical hardwood trees, process them and ship them over to the UK.

Most tropical hardwood trees grow in rainforests along the equator, so in choosing this particular decking, you’re not only contributing to deforestation, but you’re also inadvertently contributing to rising Co2 levels in the atmosphere during the decking’s transportation.

So, how can you shop more sustainably? Well, when it comes to something like garden decking, there are a few options that are far more sustainable than the hardwood decking I just described! Composite decking, for example, is made of a combination of wood flour and polymer resin, so can be made in a more sustainable way.

Some high-quality composite decking manufacturers actually create their boards using wood that would’ve ended up in landfill and post-production plastics. They even recycle the water they use to cool the boards during the manufacturing process to ensure that as little as possible is wasted!

Get creative with composting

Even if you’re a household that tries to eat healthily and reduce waste, there are bound to be skins and peelings that get thrown out. Use these discarded bits of food waste to make your garden a sustainable haven!

A compost bin is really easy to set up, just grab a container, and head out into the garden. Whenever you have leftover kitchen waste, weeds you’ve pulled up or grass clippings from the garden, pop it all in there and give it time to decompose.

The fertiliser may not smell very nice, but it will certainly give your plants and flowers a nutritious boost. If you really want to boost your composite efforts, why not ask around to see if your neighbours or local shops have any natural waste you could take off their hands?

Grow local plants & trees

I know it can be tempting to grow different species of plants and trees from all corners of the earth, but growing local plants and trees has lots of benefits.

Firstly, the soil in your garden will be primed for growing local plant species, so you won’t need to introduce chemicals or additives to get your plants to grow. Secondly, plants support local wildlife, so you’ll be doing the bees and birds a real favour by enriching their habitat with native species rather than foreign ones that might not be as useful to them.

Of course, planting trees and flowers of any kind is a great way to make your garden more sustainable because they help to take carbon out of the atmosphere, so don’t be shy… get planting!

Collect rainwater

It has always perplexed me that people will use water that they pay for to water their plants in the garden. With a very simple bit of kit like a water butt, you can create a rainwater collection and storage system that will generate a ready-to-use supply of water for your plants, free of charge!

So, if you want to switch to more sustainable gardening methods, start using a natural source of water to take care of your plants.

It’s easier than you think to make your garden more sustainable, it just requires a little bit of thought and planning. With a more sustainable attitude towards gardening, your outdoor space could help save the World!