Meeting nature halfway
Imagine a healthy garden that grows, blooms and produces food for you, your family and your neighbors, a garden that costs you very little money because everything it needs is already provided.
Welcome to the sustainable garden!
The Cambridge Dictionary defines sustainable as “causing little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time.”
Sustainable gardens are resource efficient and able to perform their intended functions indefinitely with minimal negative impact on the environment.
A garden that grows and produces well, doesn’t drain resources and money, and has a positive impact on the environment: this sounds like any gardener’s dream, right? But it’s not difficult to achieve. You can create a sustainable garden in your own yard by following some simple techniques.
A trip to the garden department of any large home improvement store might give you the impression that gardening requires a vast and confusing array of products: fertilizers, pesticides, bags of soil amendments, something specific for every situation.
Sustainable gardening takes a different approach; instead of products, there are ways of doing things which result in a garden that sustains itself.
Placer County Master Gardener Elaine Kelly Applebaum has put together a helpful document that outlines the principles and practices of sustainable gardening in “What is Sustainable Landscaping” at https:// ucanr. edu/sites/ ucmgplacer/ files/166235.pdf.
She writes “What we do in our home gardens can greatly impact the environment, for better or worse. By making the right choices of what to grow and how to care for our landscapes, we can make a positive difference, not only in the health of the environment, but in our own health as well, now and into the future.”
One simple example of a sustainable gardening practice is to select the right plant for the right area of your yard, making sure that the plant will get the correct amount of sunlight and have adequate space to grow.
Every yard has different “zones” that are appropriate for different kinds of plants: places that are sunnier or shadier, areas that have better or less good growing conditions for particular plants.
You can observe hours of sunlight throughout the day for each season of the year and select plants accordingly. You can also make sure that when plants get larger they will not be cramped for space. Thismay seemlike a “no brainer,” but the truth is that people often fail to place plants in locations where they will thrive.
Another important sustainable gardening practice is to feed your soil. Why feed soil?
The simple answer is that if you feed your soil, the soil will feed your plants, and you won’t need to buy that bag of fertilizer or bottle of plant food.
One of the best ways to feed your soil is to make your own compost using organic materials you get for free, like fallen leaves, grass clippings, wood chips, straw, paper, cardboard, kitchen vegetable scraps and twigs and small branches pruned from plants in your yard.
You can construct a simple compost bin from reclaimed materials like wooden pallets, chicken wire or cinder blocks. For the basics on composting, see http://acmg.ucanr.edu/ Growing_Your_Own_Food/Improve_Your_ Soil_With_ Compost.
Compost is dug into the soil or laid on the surface, where it continues to decompose and release nutrients into the soil.
A sustainable practice that goes hand in hand with composting is mulching, which involves laying organic material in a thick layer (four to six inches) on top of the ground around your plants.
Wood chips, sawdust, chopped leaves and straware examples of organicmaterials useful for this purpose. Mulch breaks down slowly over six to ten months, suppressing weeds and conserving water as it does so.
Growing your ownmanure is an easy way to feed your soil; and no, you don’t have to fill your front yard with goats.
Cover cropping, a sustainable cultural practice in use for over 3,000 years, involves growing a crop specifically to cover and protect the soil from erosion; a cover crop that is chopped up and turned back into or onto the soil is referred to as “green manure.”