Five Easy Tips For An Eco Friendly Garden

Spring is the time of year when the winter fantasies of gardeners everywhere start to become reality. As the bulbs start blooming and the leaves start budding, garden lovers everywhere become excited to help along yet another year of beautiful flowers and luscious plants. What better time, then, to consider the most eco friendly ways we can do that?

There are many ways to be environmentally friendly in your yard. Here are five tips to get you started:

1) Start composting. Plants and flowers love compost, which delivers life-nourishing organic matter right where they need it most. You can create a compost pile in an out of the way spot in your garden, or you can use a container. Anything will do, from an old garbage can with a few holes in it to the fancy compost tumblers you’ll find on gardening websites. Once you’re set up, add your kitchen waste and backyard scraps to it, turn it every so often, wait a few months, and you’ll be rewarded with rich black compost that your garden will love. Best of all, you will keep tons of waste out of your landfill.

2) Collect the rain. Instead of relying on water that comes from (and depletes) your local reservoir, why not gather extra rainwater to use for when you need to water your garden? There are many different kinds of rain barrels and other rain collection systems available. They are easy to attach to your gutters so that you can concentrate rain collection whenever you have a storm. Then, when the weather gets dry you can attach your hose to the barrel and release lots of water to your plants when they need it the most.

3) Plant drought-resistant plants. While on the subject of watering, the less water your plants need the better. There are many species of plants that do not require as much water as their more fussy cousins. The less water you use, the more that is available to replenish your local reservoir or aquifer.

4) Feed the local wildlife. Creating a local wildlife sanctuary is very eco friendly. You can easily build a hospitable garden for your birds by making available birdhouses, fountains, and food available for them. Likewise, you can plant flowers that readily attract hummingbirds and butterflies. What could be more beautiful than watching

5) Install some LED grow lights. Do you use your basement or garage as a place to grow seedlings? If so, you may have installed high pressure sodium or metal halide lamps, which offer nourishing light to your young plants but which unfortunately also waste lots of energy and heat. Consider LED grow lights instead, which NASA has proven work just fine by using them to grow plants in outer space. You can buy blue and red LED’s so that you can encourage either initial plant growth or later flowering, all while using up to 80% less energy than you would with other lamps.

Following these guidelines helps to ensure that your garden is maintained in the most earth friendly way possible. The key is to use a minimum of energy and water resources while recycling as much of your waste as you can.

Devlin Gerson writes about earth friendly products at EcoVillageGreen.com, where you can also read more about using LED growing lamps for your garden.