Improving Your Garden’s Ecological Credentials – Where Do I Start?

(Notes from Books #2)

The benefits of sustainable garden:
1. It must capture the carbon emissions.
2. It can moderate the urban climate.
3. It can promote health and well-being.
4. It can reduce energy consumption.

To gain those benefits, gardeners can start with simple steps to make it happen. They can:
1. reduce water waste
2. prevent water pollution
3. minimize yard waste
4. choose sustainable building material
5. stop digging
5. put the right plant in the right place
6. plant a tree
7. make room for wildlife
8. grow your own

Basic principles to build whole-system thinking in your garden
1. use the waste hierarchy: the more efficient the use of resources, the more sustainable the practice is. Consider to reuse, re-purpose, and recycled the used of material.
2. design construction for disassemble:
3. think in terms of product life cycle: calculate the embodied energy, the energy returned on energy invested of a building material over its life cycle.
4. choose local materials: think its availability, the cost, and the energy required to bring it on-site.
5. Treat water and waste as a resource

(Book: High-Impact, Low-Carbon Gardening. Alice Bowe. P.13-47)