5 Tips For A More Sustainable Garden

By now we all know how important sustainability is. Bombarded with daunting stats about climate change and global warming, the hard part is knowing what you can do to help. Beyond reducing waste in your kitchen and cutting down your fast fashion buying, your garden is a great place to start. Helping your garden get greener, here are our top tips for a more sustainable garden.

When weeds pop up or pests threaten your plants, it’s tempting to reach straight for pesticides or chemicals. However, these chemicals can be deadly to vital parts of the ecosystem like helpful insects or bees. They can also do more harm than good when it comes to your soil, affecting the delicate balance and meaning you’ll only become more and more reliant on the chemicals to battle off weeds. Instead, try using natural solutions, making your own fertiliser from the liquid you drain from your compost bin. Or, soaking weeds in water for a couple of weeks in a container creates a nutrient-rich fertiliser that will feed the plants you like, and protect soil health.

As well as letting you make your own natural fertiliser, composting is an incredibly sustainable choice for garden and kitchen. It's estimated that the UK alone wasted 6.7 tonnes of food a year, which all ends up in landfills if it's not properly recycled or composted. Composting is a great way to cut down your own impact on waste, letting you recycle your food waste in a way that benefits you. Letting you transform fruit peel, gone-off food, eggshells and more into nutrient-rich soil and plant feed, it’s a win-win situation for you and your garden.

If you want to speed up the process, cutting down the smell and trips out to the garden, try a bokashi bin. Offering a different type of composting that allows you to compost in your own kitchen odour-free, you can recycle a wider range of waste, only needing to wander out to the garden when your bin is fully composted.

It’s tempting to choose the brightest, prettiest plants you can find, but be a bit more considered with your choices for a more sustainable garden. Planting native plants (plants that naturally grow in your country) can help protect wildlife, creating the best environment for bees, butterflies, hedgehogs and more. Growing naturally in your climate means that these plants also have the best chance of surviving through the seasons, cutting down on maintenance. For the UK, try some native plants like wood anemone, Lily of the Valleys, golden shield fern and primrose.

Planting your own fruit and veg is also an incredible, sustainable choice. Helping you be more conscious of seasonal foods and cutting down on the air miles your fresh food will have travelled, cultivating your own allotment is a great place to start a more waste-free lifestyle.

In 2021, there’s really no reason to use a gas or petrol lawnmower when electric ones are now so powerful. Unnecessarily polluting and filling your calming outdoor space with fumes, petrol and gas lawnmowers instantly up your carbon footprint so opt for an electric one. Letting you plugin, get the job done and unplug without any fumes or pollution, electric or even manual garden tools are an easy swap for a more sustainable garden.

In the stress of sprucing your garden up, it’s easy to forget to recycle and just chuck your clippings into the bin. But you can recycle most garden waste, including leaves, grass cuttings, pruned branches and more. Either put it into your council provided bin and leave it out on the right day, or head down to your local recycling plant to do your bit.