By making a few small changes to your day to day gardening habits, you can help to reduce your carbon footprint, and lessen the negative impact that your day-to-day actions have on the environment. This guide offers advice for urbanites looking to reduce their carbon footprint in the garden, as part of an environmentally aware lifestyle.
1. Recycle
Don’t let lack of space put you off recycling, this really isn’t an excuse and your garden can provide the perfect place for you to do your bit. Use a corner space to build timber housing to store your recycling bins, which will make sure your garden stays looking tidy and attractive.
Alternatively, why not transform your shed into a mini recycling plant, as these can be a great place to store bulky recycling boxes. Separate materials by allocating a shelf to each, whether it’s plastics, glass, paper, tin or aluminium. You’ll find you’ll free up more space inside the home and your efforts will have a really positive impact on the environment – and it will also make you feel good too!
2. Save water
If you’ve got a lawn, then you can forget about using a sprinkler on it! This uses a huge amount of water, and really is wasteful. So, get a good old fashioned watering can out, install water butts that can collect water from shed, garage and house roofs.
When it comes to cleaning your dirty paving, decking or patios. Ditch the hose and try dissolving a garden cleaner in a bucket of water, or decanting into a power sprayer and applying to your surface. You’ll find it will do the job just as well and use far less water. Look for a garden cleaner that is free from acid and bleach such as Ronseal’s High Performance Garden Cleaner, which removes mould and algae and prevents re-growth for up to six months.
3. Eco friendly products
It's important to care for exterior wood in your garden, and protect from weather damage, otherwise it will soon look unsightly. But this is no excuse to forget about the environment. Protect timber furniture, fences and sheds with woodcare products that are low in petro chemicals and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Ronseal’s Eco range for example, is far kinder to the environment and the Eco formulations are also extremely high performance ensuring the results last longer. Not only that but 25p from every purchase goes to the Woodland Trust to help protect native UK woodland too.
4. Trees
Planting trees is one of the most important steps in reducing global warming as they absorb a huge amount of carbon during their average 70-year life span. Although most urban gardens are limited in space, this can prevent you from planting larger trees such as Oaks and Beeches, due to the eventual size of their roots, but there are alternatives. Rowan, Hawthorn and Silver Birch are all examples of small native trees that cultivate well. All of these species are hardy, they grow in most conditions, don’t take up a huge amount of room and have small leaves which only cast a dappled light shade, allowing grass and other plants to grow underneath.
For more information visit www.ronseal.co.uk or www.WoodlandTrust.org.uk/Ronseal.
