Growing a Garden? Tips for Sustainable Gardening You Need to Use

Planting a garden can have countless physical and mental benefits. Planting a sustainable garden lets you interact and give back to the earth in ways that you cannot do otherwise. Creating a sustainable garden can be accomplished by avoiding chemicals, composting, and saving your seeds.

Avoid Chemicals

 

A sustainable garden is a garden void of chemicals. Over the long run, chemicals will harm your soil, your pets, and your family through ingestion. You do need ways to control pests and weeds but reaching for a bottle of chemical herbicide or pesticide isn’t the best way to go. Instead, you can encourage pollinators, like bees, to achieve a higher crop yield. Introducing beneficial insects, like ladybugs, that eat up the plant consumers will be the perfect way to control pests without using harmful chemicals. Creating a balanced ecosystem, with plants native to the region, will help control the pests and prevent weeds from taking over. A final perk to avoiding chemicals is how harmless your plants will be to pets and people.

 

Composting

 

Composting is a valuable practice that leads to sustainable growth. Leaves, sticks, dead plants, fungi, and bacteria decay and return nutrients to the soil. These nutrients help new plants to thrive. You can use livestock manure in your compost if you have animals like chickens or cows. Worm farms are also excellent for gathering additional nutrients and can be farmed on whatever scale fits your needs. Organic matter that comes from food scraps or animal waste will feed the soil and in turn, help your garden grow.

 

Save Your Seeds

 

Before a flower or vegetable matures and dries out, they produce seeds. While gardening, you can collect their seeds and store them in a cool, dry place until the next planting season comes around. At the start of spring, use your previous plant’s seeds to grow the next year’s crops. If you are unfamiliar with saving and replanting seeds, it is generally easier to save seeds from plants like tomatoes, peas, beans, and peppers. Saving seeds will save you money and create a garden that is independent and sustainable.

 

A sustainable garden leads to a more sustainable future. Create a sustainable garden by avoiding chemicals, capitalizing on composting opportunities, and saving your seeds for the next season. This will let you interact with mother earth and thank her for the miraculous things she does each day.

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