Landscaping Like You Love the Earth

It is just a little bit ironic that landscaping, the practice of caring for and arranging the earth and growing things in a certain area, can potentially be one of the worst things for adding toxic pollution to the ground. With the abundance of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and similar products that are being spread on lawns, parks and gardens around the country, it's almost enough to have them designated as toxic waste dumping sites. Further, water use in the average city can rise as much as 50 percent when people start watering their lawns and gardens in the summer, making resource use another negative environmental impact of landscaping. Fortunately, this isn't necessary, and there are a lot of ways to garden and landscape safely, in ways that will promote health instead of increasing the chances of illness.

Using native plants for landscaping can dramatically reduce the amount of water, and poisons, used in your yard. Native plants are those that would naturally grow wild in the area. In recent years, their popularity in water-wise gardens has been increasing. Many commercial green-houses now sell a wide variety of regional species as an option for gardeners and landscapers. Because these species grow wild here, they are acclimatized to the natural weather cycle, and therefore rarely need more water than natural rainfall will provide. Growing native plants save you money and maintenance time—think lower water bills and no lawn-mowing.

A yard full of native plants will also require no herbicides or pesticides, as they are naturally able to thrive in the area. Another irony of landscaping is the chain of impact that these poisons can have upon an ecosystem. Most bugs have a predator bug, but pesticides kill them all. Take the example of aphids and ladybugs. Aphids are a sap-sucking little bug that will congregate on plants, literally sucking the life out of them. Ladybugs love to eat aphids, but you won't find ladybugs in pesticide-treated gardens, so they will never have a chance to do their job. Further, aphids tend to prey on the weakest plants, so non-native species that are struggling to survive are likely to be struck the hardest. By foregoing the pesticides, and growing local plant varieties, you may find that nature strikes a balance, and the ladybugs keep the aphids in check. If not, you can buy ladybugs at many garden centers, and release them into your yard. As ladybugs are a harmless species local to just about everywhere, this is a win/win situation.

Reducing or eliminating the poisons will attract wildlife such as birds, bugs and butterflies. In the example above, you can see how attracting bugs isn't always a bad thing. In a healthy garden, the "good" and "bad" bugs should strike a healthy balance, making intervention rarely necessary. If you do notice a pest problem hurting a specific plant or variety of plants, consider removing it/them and replacing it with something healthier, instead of spraying the bug.

Many green gardening enthusiasts also recommend using a slow release fertilizer. This avoids quick growth spurts that will require more maintenance. Instead of choosing man-made, chemical fertilizers, choose one of the natural fertilizers. While spreading manure in your yard may seem unappealing, the aged manure sold in stores is far more dirt-like than what we might imagine manure as being. There are also liquid fertilizers made of worm "castings", that are quite potent. Finally, consider starting your own compost. Compost containers, available from gardening stores and even some municipalities, are designed to increase decomposition, which means you will get a nutrient rich soil from your kitchen scraps within the year. Use this soil in your garden and the earth, plants, bugs, bees, birds, et. al. will thank you.