Growing an eco-friendly garden is amongst the most sustainable lifestyle changes you can make today. Eating produce from your yard drastically cuts down on shipping-related emissions and allowing your lawn to bloom into a wildflower meadow can support pollinators in your area.
However, some of the gardening tools and supplies you use are inadvertently undermining your desire to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Many composts still contain peat and some weed killers will also harm the bugs and insects that call your lawn home.
Rather than treating your yard as an extension of your indoor space, consider integrating bamboo and other eco-friendly practices into your garden care regime. This will turn your yard into an eco-friendly retreat for wildlife and will cut down your carbon emissions.
Peat-Free Compost
Properly composting your garden is the best way to ensure that your fruits, vegetables, and flower beds have access to the rich soil they need to grow. For most people, that means buying a blend of compost that contains peat. Peat is a spongy, energy-rich material that features in most store-bought compost blends.
However, peatlands also serve an important ecological purpose. Peat bogs are a powerful carbon sink that sequesters around 0.37 gigatonnes of CO2 a year. This means that damaging peat doesn’t just increase emissions, it also undermines efforts to soak up excess carbon in the atmosphere. Damaging peatlands has already caused a 5% uptick in carbon emissions and continuing to mass-harvest peat may set back efforts to curb the trend of climate change.
Rather than relying on peat to feed your flowers and fruits, consider creating your own high-quality compost over the course of a year. You can even put bamboo products in your compost, as you’ll need a blend of “greens”— grass clippings, vegetables, and foliage — and “browns”, such as cardboard, paper, and food scraps. Depending on where it is in its lifecycle, bamboo can qualify as green, when recently clipped, or brown, if it’s dried or been used for commercial purposes.
Energy Use
The best way to combat climate change is to minimize the amount of energy you use from non-renewable sources. This means that you may need to rethink the way you power your party lights or heat your swimming pool. You don’t necessarily need to replace your lawn with solar panels to make the most of solar power, either. There are easy ways to harness the power of the sun, which include:
- Outdoor lighting and lamps that soak up solar energy all day long and emit gentle light in the evenings after dusk;
- Solar pool heaters that will naturally warm your pool to the right temperature;
- Solar fountains and water features that house internal pumps which are powered by solar energy.
Taking these steps will minimize your carbon emissions while giving you the garden you’ve always wanted. Bamboo can also feature in these plans, as bamboo offers a fast-growing, low-impact alternative to fencing and importing hedges. This is particularly beneficial if you want to build an oasis-like area in your yard, but don’t want to bring in box hedging, which will likely require harmful pesticides to maintain. Just be sure to install a water butt, as bamboo needs plenty of watering if you want it to grow properly.
Oasis Areas
If you do decide to treat your yard and lawn as an eco-friendly oasis for wildlife, consider reserving an area for yourself and your guests. After all, gardens are supposed to be a meeting point between nature and humanity, rather than entirely natural spaces that are left to grow wild.
Start by cordoning off an area of your garden for seating and entertaining guests. This gives you a vantage point to observe wildlife in your yard and creates a sense of intentionality in your garden. This also gives you a space to throw outdoor parties in the springtime. If you do decide to host parties, consider using your yard to full effect by:
- Take clipping from your garden’s fresh flowers as decor;
- Upcycle decorations using your bamboo stakes and recycled products;
- Provide plenty of shade to guard against both rain and sun.
By reclaiming a portion of your yard for parties and al fresco dining, you can create a sustainable garden for your whole family. Local wildlife can rest in your unclipped wildflower lawn, and your kids can enjoy watching the animals come and go from a vantage point close to your home. Just be sure to strategically plant a few pollinators around your yard, as this will help you support the ecosystem beyond your garden’s boundaries.
Conclusion
Integrating bamboo into your garden design can provide much-needed shade and privacy. Bamboo can support your composting initiatives and can be easily upcycled to provide party decor. This can support your efforts to become more eco-friendly, as bamboo hedging doesn’t require as much pesticide as box hedging. You can also use your yard to soak up the power of solar energy and minimize your use of carbon-intensive non-renewable energy.
Image source: Unsplash
