Looking after the environment starts in our own backyards, literally, with the latest trend in outdoor living. This trend is firmly centred making outdoor spaces more sustainable, including growing your own food, cutting down on water use and waste, and even adding some fauna into landscape.
No matter what your budget, you can find ways to integrate sustainability into your outdoor space.
What is a Sustainable Garden?
Sustainability is all about having less impact on the environment. Many of us think, “It’s the garden. It IS the environment.”, but there are many ways to make backyards more sustainable.
This gardening trend is about following organic practices like mulching, using environmentally friendly pesticides and fertilisers, installing rain water tanks, having a worm farm, creating garden beds that reduce runoff and soil erosion, and using low maintenance, drought tolerant plants.
Edible Gardens
The trend for summer 2014 is to create a blended garden that incorporates edibles alongside ornamentals. These gardens do double duty, giving gardeners a bountiful harvest of fruit, vegetables and herbs and an alternative to turf, while still being beautiful to the senses.
Urban farming also allows you to share your harvest with neighbours, friends, and family, creating the potential to get back to the kind of communities not seen since our grandparents were children.
Adding Some Fauna to the Mix
As part of the trend toward sustainable gardens and edible aspects, more and more homeowners are adding chickens and bees to their landscape.
Chickens provide eggs, eat kitchen scraps, and make great household pets. When allowed to roam, they will eat pests and aerate the soil. Keep in mind that chicken bedding and manure should be put through your compost, to properly break down, before laying it into your garden beds, otherwise it can burn or kill your plants.
Unless you have an allergy, beekeeping is a great way to harvest your own honey. They are low maintenance, fairly easy to look after, and don’t take up a lot of space.
Need some help deciding what to do? Give your local Hire A Hubby a call for advice, and an obligation free quote, on the best way to go about it. Call 1800 803 339 or visit the website to book a free quote.
