A Prairie Garden Journal    by Dick Meyer

Green
Easy
& Cheap

Celebrating
Earth Day

How do you celebrate Earth Day in the middle of a recession?  Sure, the polar ice and glaciers all over the earth are melting.  Sure, fresh clean water is increasingly scarce.  Sure species are going extinct at an alarming rate all over the planet.   But what’s a barely-making-ends-meet-typical-working-class-American-homeowner to do?  Can’t afford new solar panels.  Can’t afford to install a new home size wind generator that spins the electric meter backwards and has the power company sending you a check each month.  Can’t afford a new hybrid or electric car.  Can’t afford to drill all of those wells to install a geothermal heating and cooling system.  It’s just too expensive to go green, right?

Well, if you’re trying to go green the way movie stars and celebrities do it, going green can cost a lot of green.  But there are plenty of ways to simply live green that don’t cost hardly any money—in fact, over the course of a year, can save you enough money that you’ll notice the difference in your family budget, and you will probably end up with a lot smaller carbon footprint than that rock star that just had solar panels installed in his Wal-Mart store sized home.

Even though the economy is in a recession and we’re no longer able to afford to buy all of that stuff to put into our rented storage units, we can still do a few cheap and easy green things like:  Drink tap water.  Drive a little less, walk a little more.  Turn down the heat in your home in winter and turn up the air conditioner in summer—and turn off a few more lights.  Recycle—even if you just start with the simple things like newspapers, magazines, plastic, glass, and cardboard. 

I have learned a little bit about “green gardening and landscaping” over the years, and I can assure you that  it’s especially easy to be cheap and green in the garden or landscape—and that it’s smart.  I continue to marvel at how hard homeowners have worked and how much money they have spent on their landscaping—often to end up unhappy with the result a few years later and calling for help.  Almost invariably the solution to their problem involves taking a “green” approach to their landscape development and maintenance, and that, in turn, almost always means working less and spending less money.  In order to be completely truthful, I should report that on several occasions I have seen homeowners actually working more out in their landscape after going green than they did before—but only because they are having so much fun and enjoying their landscape so much more

Previous Articles

Yes It's Time March 12

Pruning Trees March 26

Plant a Tree in 2009 April 02

Great Old Trees April 09

"Nighmare on Elm Street?"
Elms & Oaks for WyoNeb
April 16

2008 Articles

2007 Articles

2006 Articles
 

Here’s a few ideas how you can go green in your home landscape—every one of them guaranteed to be cheap and easy.

1.        Go (mostly) chemical free in your gardening and landscaping.   If you have a “pest” or “disease” problem in your garden or landscape, first try to solve it without using a bottle or bag full of poison.  You’ll be surprised at how often you can solve it without the bottle or bag, and gradually you’ll also find that you have fewer and fewer of those pest and disease problems show up. 

2.       Plant smaller, better trees, and plant them properly so they grow faster.   In the boom time of the 1990’s it became fashionable to plant the biggest trees possible in a new home landscape.   But it’s a lot greener to buy a smaller tree to start with and plant and care for it so that it grows quickly in your landscape.   

3.       Create a rain garden.    Now that it’s actually raining again in Wyobraska, you may want to look into creating a rain garden in your landscape.   I’d encourage you to do a little research on this subject on the internet.  It’s a really green idea.

4.       Mulch your trees.  Use mulch around the trees in your lawn and in your landscape beds.  It helps your trees grow faster, it keeps them healthier, and it stores carbon in the soil.

5.       Use a mulching mower on your lawn.  This is a no-brainer.  Using  a mulching mower means you don’t have to spend all that time emptying the clippings, the city doesn’t have to send the big gas guzzling truck around to haul off those clippings, and you don’t have to spend as much money watering or fertilizing your lawn. 

6.       Shrink your blue-grass lawn.   A blue grass lawn is green in color only.  In almost every other way it’s pretty “ungreen”.  There’s no need to get carried away and get rid of all of it, because the kids still need a place to run around a little bit, but it’s cheaper, easier, and greener to shrink your lawn to only the size you really need.

7.       Compost and reuse your fall leaves, pulled weeds, and other landscape and garden debris.  It’s worth remembering that Mother Nature recycles everything in place.