Sustainable gardening design aims to avoid making excess waste, conserve water and generally do more good than harm to our local ecosystems while creating our gardens. Sustainable gardeners should aim to create low-cost gardens that are eco-friendly without sacrificing aesthetics. Sustainable gardening is, in the long run, rewarding to you – the gardener, your family and the local ecosystem. I’ll share my favourite tips for sustainable gardening. These tips follow sustainable gardening principles and will go a long way in helping you design low maintenance gardens that benefit the environment without sacrificing beauty.
Grow Native Plants.
Grow plants that are well adapted to the Ontario climate. These are plants that have evolved in our local ecosystem over time and they can care for themselves. Native plants require little maintenance. Occasional trimming to keep the garden neat and occasional watering during dry seasons is pretty much all you have to do.
In addition to being easy to care for, Ontario natives are favourite among pollinators. Bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and other local wildlife are attracted to the natives due to their familiarity with them.
Some beautiful native Ontario plants you can grow in your garden are:
- Canada Anemone – Ontario native that spreads easily, is highly drought-tolerant and grows well in either sun or shade, making it a fabulous filler plant for those hard-to-reach spots in the garden.
- Bee Balm – This is a North American native that is not only attractive to bees but also hummingbirds and butterflies. They are also perennial meaning they are there year after year to keep adding colour to your garden.
- Purple Coneflower – Planting these flowers in your garden draws bees and butterflies making sure that your garden has plenty of pollinators. Coneflower is also very easy to care for, they don’t need additional watering during the rainy season and are drought resistant thus often thrive in dry summers.
- Cardinal Flower – Ontario native wildflower that offers tall spikes of brilliant red, trumpet-shaped flowers. The bright red colour of the flowers and the sweet nectar attract many species of hummingbirds. They can grow up to 4 feet tall, so they make quite a statement as a border plant or an eye-catching focal point for the centre of your garden.
These Ontario native flowers will offer you a vibrant garden that you have been longing for while you don’t have to devote loads of time to care and maintenance.
Conserve water.
A sustainable gardening approach is treating water as a resource. We should try to minimize water usage in our gardens as much as possible. We can make sure we preserve water by taking the following actions when designing our gardens:
- Use native plants – Plants that grow naturally in Ontario thrive all year with minimal watering. We discussed some of these plants in the above section.
- Avoid thirsty plants – These are plants that consume a high amount of water. Most of these are annuals, flowers that bloom and die after one year. Others to avoid are tropic and exotic plants as they are not naturally suited to our ecosystem and require frequent watering.
- Harvest rainwater – You should use rain barrels to collect and use rainwater in your garden. You can buy rain barrels in various sizes online or from gardening supply shops. You can harvest the water by connecting the rain barrel to a gutter and collect rain from the roof or placing rain barrels in your gardening to collect and store the rain as it falls.
- Avoid excessive watering – Make sure not to overwater your garden as this leads to water wastage. Water the plants only when they need water. A good way to know when your garden needs water is by checking the soil. Look at the soil several inches below the surface. If the soil is damp, you don’t need water. If the soil is dry, it’s time to water the plants.
- Do not use sprinklers – Use hoses and drip system instead. This leads to less water loss through evaporation and also give you more control to make sure water isn’t running off directly onto sidewalks or into gutters.
- Mulching – Mulching is essential for a healthy sustainable garden. It helps preserve moisture, regulates temperature and suppresses weeds. When spreading mulch, keep it three inches away from the base of your plants and tree trunks. This space prevents nesting grounds for insect and promotes air circulation.
Get the most out of your waste.
A big secret about having a thriving eco-friendly garden is composting. Instead of feeding your soil with inorganic fertilizers, feed it with compost. Composting is the process of recycling your food and other natural waste to be used as organic fertilizers thus providing a simple way to add nutrient-rich humus to your garden that fuels plant growth and restores vitality to depleted soil.
Here is why every sustainable gardener should incorporate composting in their garden:
- Cheap – Composting has a very low cost because it uses your food waste, which is free and other green waste from your garden(also free). It also eliminates landfill charges.
- Eco-friendly – Composting is super friendly to the environment. Apart from keeping inorganic fertilizers out of your garden, composting keeps waste off landfills too. A landfill is a site for the disposal of waste materials. In landfills, the food that rots produces methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 72 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. By composting this waste, you, in turn, lower your carbon footprint to the environment by adding it to the soil instead thus limiting methane.
- Composting enriches the soil, helping retain moisture and suppress plant diseases and pests.
In conclusion, a sustainable garden minimizes cost while allowing you to do less and enjoy more. Every gardener in Ontario should implement sustainable gardening by embracing native plants, conserving water, and minding their waste by composting. This will not only lower your gardening expenses, but you will also be helping our environment by lowering carbon footprint, improve health by being chemical-free and also preserve water for future generations.
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