Gardening continues to grow in popularity, which is wonderful. Of course, it helps you relax and gives you reasons to take a picture to post online, but if you’re the kind of person who cares for the environment, you’re doing a lot. The following are five ways your garden benefits the planet.
1. Attracts Wildlife
One reason you want to keep a good and healthy garden is to attract wildlife to your garden. As you know, the way people treat the environment is detrimental to wildlife. People rob animals and insects of their habitat. This reduces the amount of food they have and robs them of their homes.
By having a garden, you invite animals to your land, giving them much-needed nutrition. Of course, your garden should be filled with nutritious food, so be sure to do your part by fortifying your soil with things like sulfur pellets or phosphate to ensure you grow mineral-rich food for them. While you don’t want wildlife to eat everything in your garden, you should allow them to eat some of it.
2. Biodiversity
Wildlife isn’t the only thing you’ll be helping with your garden. You’ll also promote biodiversity. People tend to make their lawns look uniform. They take away the biodiversity to ensure everything looks planned out. This may look pretty; it may match your neighbors, but it hurts the environment.
Life requires diversity. This is how different species of insects, bacteria, and animals survive. You can diversify your garden. Try to grow different plants, especially the ones that grow naturally in your region. The planet will thank you for bringing back some randomness, and you’ll enjoy it, too.
3. Cleaner Air
Everyone knows that plants help clean the environment. It’s one of those things that everyone learns in elementary school. You may not know how this happens, but you remember that it does. Well, the process is called oxygenic photosynthesis, and it happens when plants suck up carbon dioxide from the environment and turn it into clean oxygen that the planet needs to breathe.
It’s a fascinating thing that happens, and you should be thankful for this. Everyone knows the planet is going through some tough times because the carbon dioxide levels are too high. Planting and maintaining a wonderful garden to clean the air is perfect. Those mornings you wake up to breathe refreshing air you are reminded that you’ve done your part to make that happen. Well, it’s mostly the plants, but you helped.
4. Energy-Efficient
Those thinking of planting vegetables, fruits, or herbs will be helping in another way. Most people have to go to the grocery store to buy things weekly. The price of gasoline is high, and it’s harmful to the environment. Growing your vegetables, herbs, and fruit helps you reduce the need to use your car and waste gasoline.
By buying less stuff at the store, you’re also helping the planet. All those products in stores have to be delivered using trucks, and those eat up a lot of gasoline, too. Your garden can help reduce your carbon footprint in more ways than you know. You may have to get some stuff at the store sometimes, but this still makes a difference.
5. Composting Benefit
With a garden, you have a great reason to start using a composting bin. This is especially true if you want your garden to be healthy because plants need a lot of compost. You know that landfills are a big problem for the environment. All that waste in landfills continues to grow without an end in sight. A composting bin gives you a chance to reduce your waste dramatically.
Most of the things that go to the trash can be composted. Newspaper, food scraps, eggshells, and much more can be put in a composting bin and fed to your garden later. If you want to go above and beyond, you can share some of your compost with other gardeners nearby. While you won’t be able to solve the landfill issue by doing this one thing, you’ll still be making a difference, and that’s what counts.
The environment is going to thank you for doing all of this. You’ll feel good in your heart. You’ll know that you’re doing your part, and you’ll even teach your kids or neighbors that being a friend to nature is rewarding.
Author bio: Maggie Bloom graduated from Utah Valley University with a degree in communication and writing. In her spare time, she loves to dance, read, and bake. She also enjoys traveling and scouting out new brunch locations. If you are into video editing and you are looking into how to remove audio from video, Maggie recommends Invideo.
