Gardening is one of the best ways to contribute to protecting and preserving mother nature, and any improvements you can make to the strategies you’re currently using will be welcomed.
From using rainwater for irrigation to making your own compost, the smallest of contributions can make a world of a difference, and if you’re consistent in improving the way you communicate with mother nature, she’ll pay it back tenfold.
Of course, no one’s asking you to go out and plant an entire forest, but rather, to do your part in making the world a better, cleaner, and healthier place.
Your garden is a bonus, no matter how small, and it’s how you organize and take care of it that makes all the difference.
We’ve put together a list of some of the more sustainable methods you can employ in order to make your garden as self-sustainable as can be.
Planting trees
A single tree means a lot, and if every gardener decided to plant one average-sized tree in their community, we could very easily soften the blow deforestation has on climate change.
That being said, trees do take time to grow, and it takes generations for a single tree to reach maturity, meaning that this is a process that has to be repeated for many years.
For every single tree that gets cut down, a responsible lumber mill should invest in planting at least three more, as a means of ensuring that in some 4 decades, that tree will have grown to replace the one cut down before it.
A single tree can store enough carbon dioxide to drive you 11 million times around the entire circumference of the Earth, and you can only imagine what millions of trees could do.
Plant one in your garden and do your part in fighting deforestation across the globe.
Rainwater is your friend
If you’ve got an outdoor garden, chances are that it’s already making use of the thousands of liters of rainwater that gets absorbed into the ground, but the same can’t be said for indoor or covered gardens.
The majority of those are irrigated through complex systems using standard tap water, very rarely infused with some of the minerals that one would expect to find in natural rainwater.
However, if you’ve got a spare container, you can lay it out in an open area and use it to collect rainwater whenever possible, allowing you to significantly reduce your water consumption while also irrigating your plants the way nature intended it.
On top of this, you can end up saving this water for particularly dry times in the month, improving the cost-effectiveness of your garden by a margin.
Composting
These days, most gardeners head to the local market in order to buy compost for their home garden, completely unaware that they could be saving hundreds of dollars every year if they were to just make their own.
We all have leftovers from food or other items from our household that can easily decompose in the soil.
By layering these atop one another and watering them regularly, we can create a small ecosystem that will allow for this “trash” to slowly turn into high-nutrient soil for all your plants.
Almost anything organic can be used for composting, ranging from disposed fruits, vegetables, and their peels to cardboard and paper, so long as it’s completely natural and free of plastic.
A single kilogram of compost can save you more than 100g of CO2 emissions every year, totaling around 5.1 kilograms of carbon dioxide every year.
Fill your garden with high-pollinating plants
It’s no secret that without bees, our planet is doomed, and while beekeeping is definitely contributing to the preservation of these miraculous insects, you can also do your part as a gardener.
Pollinator diversity is key to preserving and promoting a high diversity of insect wildlife in your area, and without a good mixture of native, near-native, and exotic plants, insects like bees, moths, butterflies, and other pollinators have a hard time keeping up.
These insects practically contribute to 80% of all pollination that happens on our planet, and without them, we’d be down to the handful of plant species that either self-pollinate or are pollinated by other animals.
Naturally, this is nowhere near enough to sustain 7 billion humans and trillions of other animals on the planet, and it wouldn’t be long before we’d reach our end.
Final word
Your garden is your main way of interacting with mother nature, and if you’re able to make it as eco-friendly as can be, you’re going to be reducing your carbon footprint by a significant amount.
Put some of these tips to good use and implement them in your garden, and while they may not make that much of a change in the short term, you’ll see your accomplishments when you look at the bigger picture.