Make Your Garden a Carbon Sink – and Help Slow Climate Change!

It’s Easy to Make Your Garden a Carbon Sink – It’s Actually LESS Work!

Just imagine if you could make a real difference and genuinely slow climate change, just by changing what you grow in your garden or yard! Or on your patio or balcony. It’s true – making your garden a carbon sink can really help.

There are 30 million gardeners in the UK. If every one of them planted just one medium-sized tree and it grew into maturity, those trees would store the same amount of carbon as is produced by driving 284 billion miles / 457 billion km, according to research by the RHS.

If every gardener produced 190kg of compost each year, they would save the amount of carbon produced by heating half a million homes for a year.

Those statistics are from the UK – but they apply all over the world. Your garden – or balcony – really can make a difference.

• To cope with climate change, gardens must become more resilient to more extreme weather – hotter and drier weather, or more rainfall.
• The ideal low-carbon garden has a wildness to it. It is packed with plants and teeming with life.

Luckily, that’s easy to do! Here’s how.

Homemade Compost

Recycle your grass clippings, fallen leaves and broken twigs by composting them. Composting is a totally natural method – you don’t need toxic chemicals to boost your plant growth.

Healthy compost should contain a 50:50 mix of

• Nitrogen – grass clippings and vegetable peels,
• Carbon – stems and paper towels.

Composting also allows you to discard any leftover food in a sustainable way. When dumped into landfill without oxygen, food waste rots and releases methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.

But on a compost heap, exposed to oxygen, organic waste is converted into stable soil carbon. Food which is composted releases just 14% of the greenhouse gases of food that is thrown away.

So, compost all your food waste and vegetable peelings, as well as lawn clippings!

Compost heaps must be turned regularly – about once a month is good. Turning compost adds air to and keeps it moist. Garden compost is ready to use when it turns a dark brown colour, has a crumbly texture and smells like damp woodland.

If you need to buy compost while you wait for your homemade compost to mature, avoid compost with peat.

Mow and Blow Less

Instead of having a pristine lawn, have a more natural lawn that you don’t need to mow as often, and that attracts wildlife (manicured lawns are quite barren by comparison).

Leaving the lawn mower in the shed or garage also benefits the climate, because it reduces your energy consumption.

Other gardening tools are just as polluting as mowers. Using a petrol-powered leaf blower produces the same emissions as a 1,770km (1,100 mile) car journey – the distance from Los Angeles to Denver – according to CARB.

Instead, leave fallen leaves where they are, they’ll add nutrients to your soil. If you don’t want to do that, then rake up your fallen leaves and compost them.

(If you live in an area where Homeowners Associations insist that you mow your lawn, talk to them and explain why lawns should be allowed to grow. Or choose alternative plants).

Soil Care

To lock in as much carbon as possible, soil needs a good balance of water, pockets of air, nutrients and living organisms, such as fungi. You achieve all of this by regularly adding homemade compost to your soil.

Also, don’t press the soil down too much or use heavy equipment when it’s wet as this will cause it to become compacted. Compacted soil is not healthy, because there are no air pockets and water cannot drain.

Don’t leave soil bare. When soil is exposed to the elements, it degrades and loses carbon. Instead, cover all open soil with plants – clover is great (it’s really easy to grow, needs little maintenance and it looks pretty too).

Mulching is also great. Mulch is decaying leaves, bark, or compost. When you spread mulch on soil, it also suppresses weeds, helps soil retain moisture and protects plant roots from extreme temperatures.

Don’t “tidy” fallen leaves and broken twigs in your garden. They are “living mulches”, which are contributing vital nutrients to the soil. You don’t need to buy polluting fertilizers when you have good mulch.

Plant Abundance

Plant a wide variety of plants – diversity is key to making your garden a carbon sink. Plants with roots that will reach different depths can penetrate all parts of the soil and spread nutrients around.

To make your garden climate-resilient, plant a mix of drought-tolerant trees, as well as trees that can withstand waterlogging. Ask your local garden centre for what works best in your specific location.

Add some native grasses, which often have long roots, some woody shrubs, and hedges, which are great at attracting wildlife and storing carbon.

In terms of flowers, it’s best to steer clear of annual flowers which need to be dug up every year – releasing locked-in carbon in the process – and opt for hardy perennials instead, such as peonies and sunflowers.

Your Garden as a Carbon Sink

When your garden is a carbon sink, you’ll end up working less (less mowing and blowing, less tidying), you’ll save money on buying compost and fertilizer, and you’ll have a wonderfully diverse garden that will be a haven for wildlife – and the envy of your neighbours!

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Warm regards,

P.S.  Don’t forget to see what you can do to help slow climate change – click here (it’s free)