Are you passionate about living a sustainable lifestyle? Many gardeners care about the environment, as much as they care about self-sufficiency.

There are 27 million gardeners in the UK. Gardeners in the UK tend to also be environmentalists, but don’t always know how to embrace sustainable growing practices. Fortunately, there are some important steps that they can take.

Make Your Garden Environmentally Friendly in a Few Simple Steps

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys caring for the plants in your garden, then chances are strong that you’re also the sort of person who appreciates the natural world, too. Fortunately, there are plenty of steps you can take to ensure that your gardening exploits don’t negatively impact the local environment. You might find that, once you’ve taken them, the entire endeavour becomes a great deal more rewarding.

Support Local Wildlife

When we think of uninvited animals in our garden, we tend to think of pests. Slugs that chew up the vegetable patch, aphids that blight our flowerbeds, moles that dig up the lawn. Being an environmentalist and gardener doesn’t mean simply putting up with these things. It just means that the ecosystem in your garden might need adjustment with the help of some top-level predators.

Insect-gobbling birds can be attracted to your garden, if you provide them with a suitable place to build a nest. Throw up a few bird-boxes and bird-baths and they’ll come from miles around. The same goes for flowering plants, which attract carnivorous insects. Slugs are eaten by birds, toads, and hedgehogs – so providing hedges for these creatures to shelter in will help to protect the rest of your plants.

Predators will save you the trouble of having to treat your garden with chemical pesticides, which in the long run will be better for both your garden and the natural world.

Used Raised Beds

Raised beds will save you the aggravation of bending down and provide extra space for helpful under-soil microbes and worms to flourish. Create them from thick strips of wood and fill them with compost. Putting together a raised bed is about the simplest woodworking job you can do. All that’s required is a drill and a few screws – or a hammer and some nails. Select a portable drill that can be used for DIY in your garden, and get to work!

Recycling waste

Manure-based fertilisers are often the go-to choice for gardeners looking to inject nutrients into the soil beneath them. But plant-based ones are assuredly better for the environment, as they don’t come from livestock. Even better, they’re free – whenever you pull up a deep-rooted weed and chuck it into the compost, you’re effectively transferring nutrients from deep in the earth to nearer the surface, where your plants can reach it.

Collect Water

Why draw water for your plants from the tap when it’s readily falling from the sky? Collect rainwater and divert it to those parts of the garden that really need it.

Grow your Own

Growing your own food is not only better for the environment, but for your wallet, too. Naturally, you’ll need to commit time and effort to achieving the right results – but in the end, those results will be more than worthwhile.

These Changes Can Go a Long Way

There are a lot of steps that you can take to be a more sustainable gardener. The steps listed above should be a great start!