As you are gardening this year, you may be inspired to make your garden more eco-friendly to encourage more luscious growth and vibrant colors. We’ve put together a few tips to allow you to give back to the environment while making your garden stand out.
Have Your Garden Embrace Local Wildlife
Instead of doing an early spring cleanup you should let the leaves and dead vegetation from the fall stay in your flower beds until later in the season to protect local pollinators that wintered in your beds. These pollinators, like the four main types of bees living in Oklahoma, are necessary to grow beautiful flowers and delicious vegetables.
You can also add a little birdbath to attract birds as a natural means of caterpillar control. Once you do clear your beds you should add them to your compost pile for nutrient-rich and eco-friendly soil.
Start Composting
Composting can help you be more eco-friendly inside and outside your home. Even if you live in an apartment and are a container gardener, you can still compost with many of the small counter-top compost bins. By composting, you are reducing waste and enriching your soil.
Composting also allows you to reduce your reliance on fertilizers, which can harm our friendly pollinators. Another benefit to composting is that it helps your soil retain moisture making your garden more drought resistant. Think of composting like recycling, just for food instead of cardboard.
Use Recycled Materials
Instead of buying little biodegradable planters you can use the pressed paper egg crates to start your seedlings, and use your eggshells as fertilizer! These egg cartons are great for planting seeds and starting your garden inside. When you put your seedlings in the ground after the last frost, the egg cartons will disintegrate into your soil allowing you to have an earlier harvest.
You can also recycle old car wheels and steel basins; in fact, with an almost 90% recycling rate, steel is one of the most recycled materials in the world. Recycled steel will allow you to create decorative planters that will hold up year after year. If your favorite coffee mug has a crack, it can make a really cute planter for a small plant while letting your mug have another life.
Choose Native Plants
Choosing plants native to your region will allow you to create a natural garden scape that will thrive with your local weather conditions. Native plants also help rejuvenate the soil to encourage more growth. You will also save yourself the heartache of dead plants by planting native species.
You may find an heirloom variety of vegetables that really thrives in your climate that you would’ve never found if you weren’t planting native plants. You will also get a whole new variety of plants by sticking with flowers and vegetables that belong in your region.
Use Unconventional Materials
Anything can be a planter and anything can be a garden decoration. You could build a series of gardens out of shipping containers since there are currently over 17 million shipping containers in circulation around the world. With the number of active shipping containers at more than five million, they need to be recycled after their nearly 200 million trips a year and can make great large-scale gardens.
Perhaps you’ve used a shipping container as a part of your home. They are so structurally sound you can plant a green roof on top to make a truly eco-friendly structure.
Creating an eco-friendly oasis of a garden does not take a complete overhaul of your garden, but a few simple steps. By adding features to attract birds and bees you’ll reduce your reliance on pesticides. Composting and using recycled materials can help reduce waste while reducing your need for fertilizers. Native plants and unconventional materials can create a unique garden design that will catch the eye of any avid gardener.
Image credit: via Storyblocks
