5 Tips on How to Decorate Your Backyard in an Eco-Minded Way?

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Eco-minded or eco-friendly gardening is not to be taken as difficult or expensive. On the contrary, it is rather easy and time and money consuming.

Gardening has changed a lot over the last 10 to 20 years and many of the jobs we all thought were necessary in your garden has proven to be time-consuming, unnecessary or as everyone found out, in a few cases, something you shouldn’t do at all. Those of you who aren’t that eco-friendly oriented, you should look into this way of gardening because of the benefits we just mentioned.

Gardening is something soothing for the soul, it is something to allow you a piece in your mind and something to activate your body from time to time. It is a recreational activity made into an art that everyone loves. Gardening should always be just like that but it wouldn’t hurt anyone of us to spice it up with a bit of eco-minded approach.

Some of us love gardening but sometimes it gets a bit out of hand when it comes to money and time needed to achieve certain things, which is why eco-gardening will benefit those of us the most. With a little help from this site, we managed to gather up some tips on how to decorate your garden in this eco-minded way. Just keep reading!

1. Hands-off

Most of us that have our gardens and enjoy gardening is somehow always there, tinkering with something, trimming, rearranging, planting and what not. When it comes to eco-friendly gardening it is somewhat hands-off. This means that you need to start putting yourself off of going into the garden and tinkering with it.

This approach takes us away from what we are used to when it comes to gardening. Not everything has to be so perfect and not everything has to be tidied up all the time. Sometimes you need to step away leave nature take its course and allow things to sort of mulch back into the ground. This approach is not only useful and low labor but it is also making your garden a carbon-friendly one.

2. Mow the lawn a lot less

Now when you have a garden you are always looking for it to be in top shape and to be trimmed to its best looks. This is not only labor intensive but it also requires you to spend money for gas if you have a gas-powered mower or electricity if you have one of those electric ones. To tend to an eco-friendly garden, you need to cut the mowing down as much as possible.

This will allow you to save time and money and it will give your garden a whole other dimension if you can bear to watch your grass be 2-3 weeks old. The advice is to if you have to mow, try and reduce it to the patches where you spend most of your time, or where you sit and rest. Other places should be left alone because more flowers will grow out of there, more nectar will be available for birds and bees, and you will have a lot more of the greens growing in your garden that will absorb carbon into the ground.

3. Stop digging

Another thing that most of us tend to do in our gardens is digging a lot. Most people tend to grow vegetables and fruits in their garden and what you will often see is those people constantly burrowed in their garden with those small or big shovels digging around. This is both time and energy consuming and you all need to stop it. According to the eco-minded garden style of gardening the less that you dig is better because every time you dig you are turning over the soil and you are exposing it to the air.

The soil is the greatest store of carbon you have in your garden and believe it or not 86% of carbon is not in your plants and trees but the soil. As soon as that soil is turned around that carbon gets exposed to the air and it oxidizes into carbon dioxide and you all gardeners know that this is your greenhouse gas.

With this in mind the less you disturb the soil and the less you turn it around the more you lock that carbon in the ground. Another side benefit to this is that you leave the ecosystem of the soil intact meaning you will have a lot more of the biomass underneath the soil which is very useful. You only dig when you need to plant something or when you need to dig some of them up.

4. Keep garden waste in the garden

Now, this seems a bit silly and counterproductive but actually, this method of eco-minded gardening will save you a lot of money. What we are talking about is composting your waste instead of disposing of it and then paying for fertilizers and whatnot.

Composting is a way to utilize everything that you take out of your garden that you don’t need, like branches, weed, grass and put it in a certain area of your garden to rot slowly and make that sweet goodness that will aid your plants in growing. It is a more economical way and more natural way of creating and using fertilization in your garden.

Although fertilizers have come a long way and they are less and less affected by bad ingredients, having a natural fertilizer is the way to go. Having a shredder in your garden for these purposes is also very helpful and when you put your garden waste through the shredder you can immediately use it as a mulch, you don’t even have to compost it down.

5. Use recyclable materials

Some people tend to have a greenhouse in their garden or any other object that can help the plants, the tools, or anything in between. If you are going with an eco-minded garden we suggest going with recyclable materials for your greenhouses, tool sheds and ancillary facilities.

They will give another perspective to your garden and bring in some rustic and old-fashioned feel to your garden. These types of constructions aren’t always big but they do require a lot of money to be put in so going green and recyclable is a way of saving and being eco-oriented.