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Green
Landscaping
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It seems like everything is
going green these days. “Greenhouse” used to mean
a building in which bedding plants are grown. Now
the term “green house” means a home that is designed
and built to be environmentally friendly. Passive
and active solar heat to reduce energy demands for
heating and cooling, non-toxic paints and
construction products, extra insulation, are all
part of a growing list of techniques that are being
used to make our human environment more sustainable
from an environmental perspective. And it doesn’t
stop there--green businesses, green lifestyles,
green vehicles.......
.everything is green, green, green.
Most homeowners probably think
of their landscape as just naturally green. What’s
not green about plants, after all? But many
landscapes aren’t all that green. Many traditional
landscapes and landscape
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maintenance practices are
actually quite “ungreen”. In Wyobraska, a lush
green lawn is not nearly as green as it looks—from
an environmental perspective. But neither is a
landscape filled with rock or gravel “mulches”.
So if you’re concerned enough
about environmental issues to be considering
greening your house, your business, your vehicle,
and your lifestyle, here are a few thoughts on ways
that you can begin to “green up” your landscape,
too. A green landscape is one that stores carbon,
promotes biodiversity, and which also promotes the
health and well-being of its human occupants. That
sounds like a tall order, but it actually isn’t.
Here are some simple approaches to greening your
landscape that are simple and easy to do. |
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Previous Articles
Fractions March 15
Yardner March 8
Urban
Legends of Trees March 22
Que
Serra, Serra March 29
Grocery Store or Garbage Dumpster Plants April 5
Planning Your Landscape Project April 12
Planting
Cool Trees April 19
Keeping
Trees Alive April 26
Thrillers, Chillers, Spillers May 03
Will
You Still Love Them May 10
Ornamental Grasses May 17
In
Memory of Cedar Trees May 24
Gardening is not Childs Play
Versatile
Viburnums June 6
Yardner Plants
June 13
2007
Garden Walk and
Blue Spruce Decline
The Birds
& Bees of Butterfly Gardening June 28
Summer
Landscaping July 5
Cutting Your Lawn Down to Size July 12
Some Like it
Hot!! July 19
When a Tree
Falls on 5th Ave
July 26
2006 Articles |
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1. Reduce the size of your lawn. There’s nothing green about the water,
fertilizer, and chemicals used on traditional
bluegrass lawns. (One recent study reported that
homeowners use 10 times as many chemicals per acre
as the average crop farmer.) Which is not to say
that it is necessary to eliminate lawns altogether.
Start by eliminating areas of your lawn that you
don’t use and don’t need.
2. Or, in Wyobraska,
convert some or all of your lawn to warm season,
drought tolerant grasses like buffalo grass or blue
grama. They require less irrigation, less
fertilizer, and less maintenance. They work
particularly well in low-traffic areas of your
landscape—in other words, don’t convert the
neighborhood football field to these grasses, but
consider them for those areas of your lawn that are
only walked on when they are being mowed.
3. Taking out lawn and
planting back trees is a “double green move”.
There’s been a lot of talk in the news media lately
about the environmental benefits of planting trees
because they store carbon in their woody tissues.
But instead of planting “lawn trees”, consider
planting a little forest area in your landscape.
The trees will like it if they don’t have to grow in
a lawn area, and a grouping or evergreen trees like
pines or juniper is an easy way to take up a lot of
space without a lot of ongoing maintenance.
4. Create a wildlife
area in your landscape. In a residential
neighborhood, a wildlife area may attract only
birds, bees, butterflies, squirrels, and rabbits,
but their presence in your landscape first of all
tells you that your landscape is safe for you and
your children. When you research how to create a
wildlife landscape, you’ll find that it’s partly
about the right sizes of plants, using plants the
provide food and shelter, having water somewhere in
the landscape, and perhaps most importantly, using
few, if any chemicals, especially insecticides.
5. Using mulch in your
landscape beds is a very green landscape practice.
Mulch promotes a healthy and diverse soil ecosystem
which also absorbs and stores rainfall more
effectively, and in many other ways promotes the
health of plants growing in mulched soils. Healthy
plants reduce the temptation on homeowners to use
environmentally harmful insecticides. And to top it
all off, as mulch breaks down, a significant portion
of its carbon content ends up in the soil, and not
in the air.
6. Use more native
plants. There is a national trend in landscapes to
use more native plants, but perhaps nowhere is the
use of native plants “greener” than in Wyobraska.
Native plants generally require less water, less
fertilizer, and less care than non-natives, and
almost always end up looking more attractive in the
landscape than their more exotic alternatives.
There is a common misconception that native plants
are drab and unattractive landscape plants. But
much of the research in ornamental plants over the
past 20 years has been in the area of native
plants. That means that a lot of native plants have
had some pretty extreme makeovers in recent years,
and you might just want to take another look.
So if you’ve just happened to catch an hour of Al
Gore on C-Span because the batteries in your remote
were dead, and are now all fired up about the
environment, consider greening your landscape as
well as your home.
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