So having a lawn doesn’t sound so great anymore, but what will you do with the piece of land where your grass grows?
If you’re like me, you’ll want to use this land to reduce your carbon footprint as much as possible.
The solution is to use native plants to restore the land and most importantly – the soil.
When you use native plants, you won’t have to water your garden, you won’t need to use loud, expensive, carbon-emitting maintenance equipment, and you will have the time and energy to actually enjoy your natural landscape. Native wildflowers and other plants can be beautiful and give pollinators like bees and butterflies new habitats so that they can continue playing their vital role in our ecosystems.
Native plants have the added benefit of storing carbon in the soil thanks to a process called carbon sequestration (also called carbon farming) because of their long, intricate root systems and their symbiotic relationships with fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi are an integral part of a healthy soil biome because they store carbon from plants in the soil while giving the plants nitrogen and other essential nutrients. It is important to have a mixture of native shrubs, trees, wildflowers, long grasses, and cover crops, to keep these root systems biologically diverse and healthy.
The Canadian Wildlife Federation has a great tool for finding plants native to your province or territory:
https://cwf-fcf.org/en/resources/encyclopedias/native-plant-encyclopedia/