How Green Is Your Garden?

 

Emerging from a long, grey winter, the time has come to think about your garden and what it can offer you this year. More space for entertaining? An escape from the world and a place to relax? A playground for your children? Your outside space is just as important to the value of your home as the interiors. If you’ve taken care to design a home that is safe, welcoming and eco-friendly, you may want to use the same principles when it comes to going outside. It’s easier than you think to create a self-sustaining garden that reduces waste, incorporates renewables and encourages habitats for local wildlife. Gardens play a unique role, having a positive impact on the slowing of climate change – here’s how you can bring extra planet-friendless to your outdoor space.

 

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

This manta holds doubly true when it comes to gardens. Growing your own vegetables is a brilliant idea from so many perspectives. It provides delicious, pesticide-free food for the family, is great for the environment and helps to gets kids interested in healthy food preparation. Use kitchen scraps as compost to feed your growing garden. You can also look at ways to reduce your water usage, from installing a water butt to decrease the fresh water you need to service the garden to grander solutions such as a personal borehole installation from Nicholls Boreholes that can give you a stunning water feature and reduce your carbon footprint. Make sure you reuse everyday packaging too, such as egg trays to house seedlings, and clipped plastic bottles to shelter young plants from the frost.

 

Get Into Mini Beasts and Birds

From beetles and bees to ladybirds and lacewings, native insects are so good for the ecosystem. The trick here is to encourage habitats for beneficial bugs, which in turn helps to control the population of harmful insects such as greenfly and blackfly that will eat plants and flowers and blight vegetable crops. It’s easy to set this in motion through what you choose to plant. Sunflowers and marigolds will not only bring a cheerful injection of colour to your planting scheme but will attract the good bugs and minimise any damage to your plants. It’s also worth seeing what you can do to encourage birds, such as installing bird feeders. Not only will it fill the air with birdsong, but you can eliminate harmful synthetic insecticides and weed killers that are toxic to the environment and sometimes to domestic pets. Rely on birds to be your natural pest control. If that’s not fast-acting enough, there are some easy home remedies to slugs and snails including using crushed eggshells as a barrier.

 

Consider Companion Planting

Certain combinations of plant, grown close together are believed to naturally ward off pests that attack your flowers and veg. Growing a variety of different crops is the best way to help prevent one crop being devastated by disease or ravaging pests. Look into combinations of companion plants to put together to add a natural diversity and protection to your garden.