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Eco-Friendly Garden

Just because your garden looks green doesn’t mean it is good for the environment. An eco-friendly garden should be free of chemicals, require little or no watering, provide a home for wildlife and ideally produce some food.

Go organic

The number of chemicals in everyday use has grown massively in recent decades, and that includes in our gardens. Fertilisers, weed-killers and pesticides can contain highly toxic chemicals. These chemicals pose a potential health risk to ourselves, and also damage the soil in the long run. When they are washed away into our waterways they can affect marine life and get back into the food chain.

In fact, no one really knows the effects of long-term exposure to so many chemicals, so the best thing is to avoid them entirely. And it's not hard to maintain a beautiful garden without artificial chemicals. Begin by composting your food scraps to produce a natural, nourishing soil fertiliser. You can also buy organic fertiliser from most plant nurseries.
Get a good book on organic gardening to learn other techniques for pest control, such as companion planting, which involves putting plants with natural insect- or bug-repelling properties next to another plant that you want to protect.

Encourage wildlife

Encouraging native animals, birds and reptiles into your garden helps support Australian wildlife, which has been decimated by introduced animals such as cats, foxes and Indian mynahs. It will also bring your garden to life, filling it with movement, colour and sound. A typical Australian suburban garden can provide a home or feeding ground for birds such as lorikeets, rosellas, galahs and cockatoos; for mammals such as possums, and for lizards and frogs.

Bring wildlife into your garden by planting flowering native bushes and shrubs for birds to feed on. You could also put in a bird bath or nesting box. Fence off an area from domestic pets if you have them. Rocks, fallen leaves and branches, and areas of ground cover foliage will encourage lizards and skinks.

Produce food

Growing food in your garden is good for the planet because it means less trucks and planes hauling food thousands of miles from grower to your home. Food transportation produces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. But growing food is good for you too. You’ll get the freshest possible organic food for a fraction of what it would cost in the shops. That’s healthier too, because fruit and vegetables begin to lose vitamins as soon as they are picked.

Easy things to grow include tomatoes, lettuce and kitchen herbs such as basil, coriander, rosemary and parsley. A chicken coop with a couple of chickens means you can have fresh free-range eggs, while the chooks will help get rid of grubs and mosquitoes. Fruit trees generally require little looking after once established. If you really want to get stuck into food production, it's been calculated that a back yard of about seven square metres can produce enough food to feed a family of four.

Be water-wise

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth and climate change could make it even drier. Almost every Australian city now faces water shortages. So the days of leaving the sprinklers running for hours are gone. But it really isn't that hard to maintain a flourishing garden on a fraction of the water we used in the old days.

Seek advice from your local nursery or a landscape gardener about good water-wise plants that will do well with minimal water. Suitable native plants (see below) should require no watering once established. Lawns can guzzle water. Consider reducing the area of lawn in your garden by creating patios or decking instead, or simply having shrubs surrounded by mulch. Or plant drought-resistant varieties of turf, such as Sir Walter or Palmetto.

Other ways to reduce water include putting mulch on flowerbeds to reduce evaporation; watering in the cool of the late afternoon (again, to avoid evaporation); and using undersoil drip irrigation systems, which use much less water than surface watering. If you adopt these water-saving techniques you should be able to get all the water you need for your garden from a rainwater tank, and by recycled greywater from your washing machine and dishwasher with a greywater diversion system.

Use native Australian plants

Once established, the right native plants will flourish without needing any water and will attract native birds. An important point when choosing native plants is to select plants that are suitable for the climate and soil in your garden - don't plant desert plants in an area that is naturally rainforest, or vice versa. The best approach is to choose species of plant that grow naturally in your local area.

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