Easy Steps to Make Your Garden More Sustainable (Part 1)

For 2023, Winchester’s Sustainability Director, Ken Pruitt, secured a grant to help Winchester, Arlington, Stoneham residents learn how to create and maintain more sustainable gardens. Through training videos and a comprehensive handbook, released later this year, the hope is that it will equip homeowners and local contractors with the tools to create more environmentally friendly gardens. Go to Ken’s Sustainability Page to learn more. I am supporting his efforts on the Steering Committee and providing input for the handbook, especially some easy first steps that I  am covering below.

As we get started in the season, I want to cover some practices that we can all incorporate into our gardens to help create a more sustainable landscape. What does that mean anyway? At its most basic level, it means a landscape that is environmentally friendly. At its extreme, it is a landscape of purely native plants, free of monoculture lawns, that requires minimal water, recharges the water table and mitigates erosion. It supports animal, insect, and plant systems with minimal input and no chemical usage.  

Not all of us want to dig everything up and start over, so what can we do to create a healthier environment and preserve important resources, while keeping a garden that we want? Reach out if you want to learn more as I can’t go into all of the details here, and I will talk you to sleep about changes you can do to make a big difference.

If I can just get a few hundred of you to take small steps, then we will be making a real difference. This doesn’t mean more work, but shifting to new practices and products. 

I am going to break the topics into two newsletters so this section doesn’t get too long.

• Efficient and Effective Irrigation – Many of you live in areas that have water bans during the summer, so being efficient is the most important factor. Watering less often and for a longer period is the most effective way to properly water plants. Ultimately it drives the roots deeper into the soil and makes them more drought tolerant.  Short watering every day or other day leads to most of the water evaporating and brings roots to the surface as they search for moisture that doesn’t penetrate. With poor irrigation procedures, we are creating lawns and gardens that need more water.  In talking with Bob Nevola, of Bob Nevola and Sons Irrigation and Lighting, there are some great technologies to make your irrigation system effective.  Most important is to use a rain sensor.  Seeing irrigation systems on during the rain or the day after is a challenge. Flowmeters can track the water you are using. WiFi Controllers allow you to monitor system and manage schedules and watering from your phone or computer. These new controllers can also link to weather systems to add watering or skip scheduled events based upon rain and temperature. Drip and micro-drip systems allow for much more efficient watering resulting in less evaporation and the ability to get into pots and other hard to reach areas. At the end of the day it is about minimizing waste and cost.
• Healthy Lawn Care – Please consider changing your lawn program to an organic approach.  Whether you do it yourself or have a company manage, it is easy and only slightly more expensive. Healthy lawns will compete well with weeds, and if you have to kill the weeds, do it on a spot basis, rather than constantly covering your whole lawn with unnecessary chemicals every time you apply fertilizer. Insecticides are also largely unnecessary and they kill everything in your lawn that is food for birds and animals. As an example, we have largely lost our suburban lightening bugs because lawn care programs cover our lawns with insecticides every time. Most good companies offer hybrid and organic programs.
• Electric Equipment – The transition is happening. I am part way there and hope to make the full transition shortly with all my equipment. All you have to do is look at your local retailer to see that every tool is available for homeowners in electric with batteries that are interchangeable. Check out Quiet Clean Winchester for info on equipment and the many benefits of going electric, not just the decreased sound but the mitigation of  the health problems of gas and oil exhaust from two-cycle engines. Blowers, mowers, string trimmers, chain saws, hedge clippers, and more can all electric with rechargeable batteries.

Next newsletter we will cover: Creating a pollinator garden, native plantings, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and organic fertilizers.