Much of current talk on climate control or global warming centres around ecosystems; an area of natural land where the plants and animals - plus little ol' bacteria - work in unison to sustain a cycle of growth and regrowth. So the sea, coral reefs, grasslands, deserts and rainforests, are all ecosystems.
And so is your garden.
Because - all be it on a much smaller scale - the plants we plant in gardens affect what birds, animals and insects go there, and these in turn have their effects on the plant life. So we've all got ecosystems going on right in front of us, and maintaining a healthy and ethical garden is one simple way to do our bit for the environment.
There are several ways to establish a healthy ecosystem in your garden, and they are easy and effective. Detailed here, then, are some of the best and most common procedures.
This links an ethical garden to an ethical household, because most kitchen waste can be placed neatly in a compost bin and left to decompose. So rotten vegetables - or simply whatever veg you don't use - can all be composted. So can dead plants, hedge trimmings and grass cuttings.
After the waste has all broken down into compost, it can be used as a good natural fertiliser, meaning strong, healthy soil. This leads to healthy plants and grass, too.
And - because your waste has gone into composting - you are preventing it going to landfills. So composting completes the cycle; a good household environment, to a good garden, right through to a good national environment, and back round.
Birds:
A good garden provides a good resting place for birds, and the birds will help your garden too. They will happily eat many of the insects that feed off plants, meaning that the ecosystem is maintained; insects, moderated by the birds, moderate the growth of plant life. If one of the three elements is removed, the imbalance will mean - for example - overgrown plant life, or too many insects and lots of dead plants. A good bird population will curb that.
And it's fairly easy to attract them. Bird baths or bird tables are fairly cheap, and tables can be made from home using old wood. If you want to house birds in the long term, bird boxes can provide nesting place for whole families.
A pond will attract new kinds of animals. They are common breeding places for frogs, who - like birds - will take it as a welcome home, and feed on the insects that in turn feed on the pond's plant life.
It will also provide a bathing area for birds, linking the pond back to more prominent aspects of your garden.
So its easy to see, then, that making your garden eco-friendly is relatively simple and cheap, and makes for a more pleasant view. Not only that, it provides an effective way to remove household waste ethically, meaning that a healthy garden benefits any home that is interested in being envirionmentally friendly.
It seems there's little reason not to go greener with your green garden.
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Posted under Articles, Gardening & Outdoors, How To's & Guides
This post was written by Chris Woolfrey on July 30, 2008