Ten Steps to Environmentally Friendly Landscaping

By Sonia C Llesol

When making homes more eco-friendly, most homeowners begin inside the house, such as choosing energy-efficient appliances and compact fluorescent bulbs. But there are also many chances that exist outside the home to make sure that we are being environmentally responsible such as doing environmentally friendly landscaping.

Eco-friendly landscaping saves time, water and money. A truly green garden and yard also spells out less work. Conventional landscaping wastes a lot of water and needs pesticides. Environmentally friendly landscapes require less water and less chemical involvement. Instead of using pesticides that are harmful to nature, you can apply some basic wisdom to integrate your yard with the natural ecosystem.

Tips on an Environmentally Friendly Landscaping:

1. The best way to green your garden is planting the right plants in the right place. Plants naturally like to grow based on soil, sun and water. Choose plants that naturally grow in your area and more likely to attract native birds, butterflies and bees which will enhance the beauty of your garden and helps it grow. In choosing the spots for your plants, take into consideration how big they will grow and give enough room for them to grow to their natural size. This can create a shade for your garden and saves you money on cooling costs.

2. Reduce the size of your lawn and replace with diverse landscape beds. Reducing your turf saves energy, mowing time, water consumption and lessens the need for fertilizers.

3. Lessen your pesticide use and try to improve your soil so plants will grow healthy and discourage pests and diseases. Before using chemicals, take some time to identify the problem and research for ways to manage it without using chemicals. You can ask your local nursery for more details about this.

4. Build a rain garden. This is not only a great way to utilize your yard's existing topography but they do wonders on reducing water pollution and storm water runoff.

5. Leave the grass clippings on your yard instead of bagging them to be sent to a landfill. Begin a compost pile to recycle dead flowers, fallen leaves and plant cuttings.

6. Establish a wildlife habitat that provides home for butterflies, hummingbirds and beneficial insects. Consider trees or plants with berries, flowers and fruits. Fuschias and trumpet vines attract hummingbirds. Beneficial insects are drawn by sunflowers, thyme, alyssum, calendula and snowberry.

7. Exercise natural lawn care by mowing the lawn on a high setting in order to develop deeper roots and push out weeds. Mow your lawn regularly to remove only one-third of the length of the grass each time you mow. Cutting too much in one setting stresses the grass.

8. Choose absorbent materials for your patios, walkways and paths. Absorbent patios and walkways let rainwater to be captured by soil and then returned to aquifers where it will be purified instead of being shipped out to the ocean filled with pollutants that could harm the marine life.

9. Source your landscaping materials locally. You may not have an idea of how far your ornamental rock has to travel to get to your yard. There is a lot of environmental impact in harvesting that rock and as transportation rates continue to rise, it is more sensible to look for materials in your locality and recycle as much as possible.

10. Plan and design your eco-friendly landscape on paper. Through this you will be able to save on costs and maintenance on your landscaping. A professional will be able to make suggestions and help you choose the right plants and techniques on improving the quality of the soil and increase the irrigation efficiency of your yard.

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How to Implement Eco-Friendly Features in Landscape Gardening

By Satya Narayan Das

Landscaping is improving the natural beauty of piece of land by planting different combination of plants and making the garden organic. Landscaping gardening works with almost all types of garden and you can do it to improve the height, size or beauty of the garden according to your style and tastes.

Making use of organic landscaping gardening techniques can save you a lot of money and since you use organic techniques it can help save the environment and make it healthier for humans and animals alike. The outdoor is a prime location and you can show your commitment of developing a green building that is beautiful, stunning, require less maintenance and save you money with every passing year.

Get the right plants and think before using chemicals. Many make the mistake of choosing plants only for their beauty and not thinking of the maintenance costs; maintaining plants can be expensive and caring for them could take away a chunk of your time. Plants that are drought tolerant are the best suited for any climate and those that are native to the place you stay are a better bet any day. The native plants grow naturally without much human interference and will require a little more watering other than the required amount of rainfall, however, there would not be any requirement of soil amendments.

Weeds can get in the way of plant growth however they are not as bad as having pests that invade the plants, chemical pesticides need to be used to eradicate these pests. Compost is relatively easier to get at home and in suburban yards that there is no requirement to use to chemical fertilizers unless you want a garden that is perfectly manicured. Chemical herbicides cannot be done without but minimum usage could build a good ecosystem.

Recycling can save so much as it makes use of existing products to create a clean environment. Materials that can be recycled include shredded leaves, rocks, and gravel. If mulch is included in the landscape environment, weed growth is prevented and water evaporation is reduced. As a result, you use save on water usage and also the use of chemicals.

If you are able to make your own compost it will work out cheaper and would be always available at your disposal. When you have your landscape designed with nature in mind and use products that are organic; you would not suffer from invasion of many pests compared to conventionally designed landscapes.

Not everyone practices outdoor living but after a hard day's work to relax in your lawn with green everywhere can having a claiming effect on you. Imagine coming home and having to mow the lawn, trim it or rake away dried leaves. Let your eco-friendly landscaping gardening techniques that is low on maintenance take care to de-stress you.

Reducing landscape maintenance is by reducing the size of the lawn. Many have transformed their yards into huge landscapes by eradicating the grass and replacing it with low-care, drought-resistant shrubs with mulch filled in the spaces. This transformation can give you less work for the landscape in the future and a bed of shrubs will give a much pleasurable appeal in a landscape than a monolith of a lawn. The effective way of removing features that attracts pests are by adding physical barriers and getting mechanical methods for removing pests; this will help cut down on pesticide and herbicide costs and make your landscape less toxic and more enjoyable.

If you are really interested to know more about landscape gardening, visit our blogs at http://www.landscape-idea.com and post your valuable comments on our blogs.

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