Environmentally friendly landscaping doesn’t have to mean completely redesigning your yard.
A lot of it is simply changing how we take care of the landscapes we already have.
We’ve been taught that a “well-maintained” yard should be neat and tidy. Leaves get hauled away. Dead plants get cut down. Weeds get sprayed. Everything gets cleaned up.
Nature doesn’t work that way.
If we’re trying to build healthier yards, here are three pretty simple places to start.
1. Leave the Leaves—and the Stems
Leaves aren’t garbage.
In a natural ecosystem, leaves fall underneath trees and shrubs, decompose and eventually return their nutrients to the soil. They’re also important habitat for insects and other little friends that overwinter in the leaf litter.
So leave them where you can.
If you need to clean them off the lawn, move them into your landscape beds instead of bagging them up and hauling them away.
And while you’re at it, leave your perennial stems standing through the winter. Hollow stems provide nesting and overwintering habitat for some of our native bees and other insects.
A little less fall cleanup can actually make your yard a lot more useful.
2. Know What’s Growing in Your Yard
You don’t need to know the name of every plant in your landscape.
But you should know what the troublemakers are.
Learning to identify invasive and aggressive plants means you can deal with them while they’re still small instead of discovering three years from now that they’ve taken over an entire section of your yard.
Plant identification apps make this ridiculously easy.
Take a picture. Get an idea of what you’re looking at. Then figure out whether it’s something you want to keep, manage or remove.
Observation is one of the most underrated landscape maintenance tools we have.
3. Be Smarter About Weeds
Not every weed requires a chemical.
If you can remove the entire plant—including the root—you can take care of a lot of weeds with a simple weeding fork and a few minutes of work.
But I’m also not a purist.
There are aggressive perennial weeds where selective herbicide use can sometimes be the most practical option. The goal isn’t to earn some kind of pesticide-purity award.
The goal is to use as little as possible and only where it’s actually necessary.
That’s a pretty big improvement over spraying everything just because a weed exists somewhere in the yard.
Environmentally Friendly Landscaping Can Be Easier
That’s the part I wish more homeowners knew.
A healthier landscape doesn’t necessarily require more work.
Leave some leaves.
Leave some stems.
Learn what’s growing.
Pull the weeds you can and selectively deal with the ones you can’t.
Sometimes environmentally friendly landscaping is simply doing a little less—and paying a little more attention.
This is Part II of our three-part series on nine simple actions you can take to build a healthier yard. Listen to the podcast for a deeper dive into these three environmentally friendly landscaping practices.
This is Part II of a three-part podcast series on nine simple actions you can take to build a healthier yard. Listen to the episode for a deeper dive into these three sustainable lawn care practices.
- Part I: Sustainable Lawn Care: Three Ways to Build a Healthier Lawn
- Part II: Environmentally Friendly Landscape: Three Easy Changes
- Part III: Keystone Plants
Click play above to listen to go deeper on this post. Listen and subscribe to A Better Yard: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music | iHeartRadio | Pandora
Environmentally Friendly Landscaping Podcast Transcript
Link to Transcript