Ready for an easier, more eco-friendly landscape? A sustainable garden is an easy breezy solution to balance curb appeal, beauty, and nature without the resource and labor-heavy maintenance!
Choosing plants that are adapted to your climate and garden environment is the first step in reducing your footprint and helping your garden care for itself!
The Natural Garden
Sustainable landscapes not only benefit you and your local environment but also save you time and money! Think of it as passive gardening!
Reducing pesticides and artificial fertilizers, lowering your water usage, reducing your carbon footprint, and saving time and money with low-maintenance plants, having a sustainable garden plan is a surefire way to have a ‘greener’ landscape!
Shake Off The Lawn
The great American lawn is a remnant of wealthy European early 15th-century landowners showing off how they could enjoy so much land and not need to farm on it, planting turf that you can’t eat or sell, and needed tons of water and maintenance to keep up.
You can reduce the burden of hungry turf grass in a number of ways and not lose out on curb appeal yet reduce the impact your lawn has on your ecosystem and wallet! Another option is to swap out your turf grass for another low-growing but lower maintenance and lower water usage living green carpet or groundcover.
- Go low-mow
- Use a Turf Alternative
- Choose low-water usage turf
- Use native Grass such as Buffalo Grass
- Go full front yard or backyard wildflower garden, meadow or prairie
Smaller steps can involve simply reducing your lawn size (more gardens!) and watering at the right time of the day. Early morning watering is a great idea because it dries quickly reducing the chance of disease. Watering your lawn the right way by ensuring the turf is deeply rooted by watering less frequently but deeply when you do water, making your lawn better suited to handling drought and heat in the summer.
Low Water Usage & Xeric Plants
Aside from finding plants that are rated for your growing zone, choose plants that are drought-resistant and low-water-usage trees, shrubs, and perennials that won’t need much extra water once established.
- Create Water-wise landscapes with Xeriscape plants and Rock gardens.
- Using mulch over the soil reduces moisture evaporation, keeps roots cool, and improves the soil quality gradually as it breaks down.
Go Native
Try and use Native plants in places in your landscape that mimic where they would grow natively. Natives won’t need as much water, fertilizer, or care and are pretty much plant-it-and-forget-it solutions to having a more eco-friendly landscape that gives back to your beneficial insects and wildlife!
Choose Pest & Disease Resistant Plants
Many native plants and a wonderfully expansive number of new cultivars of natives are available to gardeners nowadays that are naturally pest and disease-resistant! This reduces not only heartache when these issues cause damage, but also reduces the need to spray and release chemicals into the air and soil.
Bring in Beneficial Insects
Choosing plants and landscape features (like ponds, bird baths, or bat houses) will all help lure in the beneficial bugs that eat pests! Dragonflies, Praying Mantis, Bats, Ladybugs, Birds, Assassin Bugs, predatory Wasps, garden Spiders, and more all help keep the balance with insects that destroy your landscape or bite you! This form of bio-control reduces your need to spray significantly.
- Water Feature or Bird Bath
- Install a Bat Box
- Pollinator Insect House or Bee Barn
- Bird Nesting Boxes & Feeders
- Buy Ladybug and Mantis eggs to release in your garden
Choose targeted pesticides, lures, or practices that physically control specific pests, and other options that won’t kill indiscriminately, ending your good bugs along with the bad bugs!
Have Your Hardscapes Go Green
In addition to using natural and organic pest and weed control, using natural materials in your garden keeps them out of the landfill and out of the environment.
- Avoid concrete that creates acidic conditions, doesn’t let water permeate
- Reduce waste by reusing natural landscape structures like Wattle fencing and Hugelkultur with items that usually would have simply been discarded
- Use upcycled, recycled, and reclaimed materials
- Choose naturally sourced materials and organic options
- Compost your lawn clippings and other natural materials
Work With Your Landscapes Flaws
If you are working with hard-to-mow hills and dangerous slopes, areas where water collects in low areas, where rainwater floods and flows that need to be filtered before heading back into the groundwater or are causing erosion.
Create tiered slopes, plant spreading groundcover with deep roots, create filtering gardens, or small ponds to collect water.
Many newer properties don’t benefit from mature trees that shade your home and lawn, making it more difficult for plants and turf (and us) to handle strong winds in the winter or relentless sun in the summer. Save money and reduce energy consumption by planting fast-growing shade trees like Locust, Maples, and more that shade your home and landscape.
- Bioswale
- Create A Rain Garden
- Reduce Erosion & Slow Runoff On Hillsides
- Mass Plantings
- Plant shade trees on the southwest side to shade your home from hot afternoon sun
- Plant windbreaks or Evergreens on the North and West sides of your home to block winter winds
Buffer Zones
A buffer zone is a type of garden plan, sometimes known as a riparian area, that acts as a small strip of native plants, prairie plants, or wildflowers. Keep your HOA and your pollinators happy by providing a small area out of the way for them to live. Buffer zones can also be used to protect a native area from your manicured lawn or agricultural areas.
Agricultural areas utilize Buffer Zones by providing a safe haven for pollinators, a spot for natives to grow, or just stop drift from pesticides and other chemicals.
This not only gives bodies of water and naturalized areas protection and a place for wildlife to live. Easily creating a habitat for all to enjoy.
Know When To Water
Save water and reduce evaporation while lowering your water bill simply by watering the right way!
- Watering only during the early morning or late evening hours to reduce evaporation
- Water directly at the roots, using soaker hoses, or drip irrigation
- Water deeply but less frequently to make plants create deep root systems that are more drought-tolerant
Keeping excess moisture off the leaves and watering at the roots keeps moisture where plants need it most while reducing foliar issues.
Easy Green Practices
These are some small steps that help you get a bit greener can be easy or even free!
- Install a Rain barrel
- Planting one small wildflower garden
- Include a few native plants among the more pampered Roses
- Create a rooftop garden
- Plant a tree
- Grow your own fruit or veggies
- Improve your soil
- Apply mulch over all your plant's roots
- Use electric or manual lawn equipment
A Greener Garden!
Taking either big or small steps towards a more eco-friendly landscape all help lower your footprint while making a big impact on your local environment, even if that environment is a small patch of wildflowers, a bee motel, or a single tree!
Nature Hills has a large selection of Native plants and Blogs to help you find the perfect plant to include in your garden and resistant plants that stand up to the rigors of nature!
Sustainability is a mindset and a way of life, but it doesn’t have to be costly or difficult! Any small act you make towards going greener in your garden!
Happy Planting!
