So often, growing a garden is listed as one of the ways we can each reduce our personal and household carbon footprints. But did you know that many wide-spread practices are amazingly un-green? And I'm not referring only to the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbacides, etc. I mean many well-accepted organic gardening practices.
Now, isn't that just a shame? So many of us are earnestly trying to do the
right thing, but in the process may be doing the
wrong thing instead. Hasso Ewing, Co-Chair of
ConcordCAN, recommended a book to me about this very subject as we were complaining to one another about this very problem. It was just published this June and is called
The Climate Conscious Gardener, from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Guides for a Greener Planet series.
I finished reading it last week, and it was hugely informative and affirming (turns out, many of my lazy gardener methods are the greener ones!). A lot of it referred to landscaping, not just gardening for food, medicine or flowers. I therefore want to pass along 7 things that we can start doing right away to reduce our individual and collective carbon footprints in the midst of our growing season.
1) Don't pull up roots if you don't have to. Roots left in the soil leave behind organic matter we need to return to the soil. Some weeds (ragweed? lady thumb? pigweed?) can be sheered off just at soil level or just below with a knife or scissors. Others (like grass) MUST be pulled with at least the crown of roots or else it will come back. Experiment to see what weeds will/won't come back.
The same goes for veggie crops: leave the roots when you pull out your beans or other expended crops. This will nourish the soil.
2) Don't disturb the soil more than you have to, and maybe you don't have to very much or often. There are SEVERAL really good reasons not to dig around too much in the soil, which if there is curiosity I will list. Just know that turning over soil has a HUGE carbon footprint, and it wastes a ton of soil nutrition, too. Many amendments can be simply layered on the surface. If you are doing a mid-season replanting of an area, put down your compost, manure, etc on the surface and plant right into it. If you need to dig enough of a hole to get the roots down into the soil, that's fine.
3) Use mulch. Hay, paper, leaves, wood chips, whatever! We often dont' think of them this way, but both compost and manure are also fine mulches, and will help you retain moisture, prevent weeds, and increase the fertility of the soil. We could all use more of this at EQF!
4) Woody perennials sequester carbon well. If you're planting any, you can be satisfied that shrubs and other woody plants are longer-lived than herbaceous plants, and therefore sequester carbon for longer periods of time.
5) Save seeds. If your plants are open pollinated (heirlooms generally are) and you know how to save their seed, you will not be expending resources to have seeds shipped to you. And if you save seeds from successful plants you grew yourself, they are selected for our specific climate and your own gardening mojo-- and will help you continue to be a successful gardener into the future.
6) Think carefully about transplants you grow or buy. How far away did the plants have to be shipped to get to you? Better if locally grown. And not in perlite/peat potting soil (see below).
If growing your own starts, are you using peat or perlite in the potting mix? If so, instead mix compost, garden soil and sand in equal parts as a substitute. Perlite takes HUGE energy resources to make and bring to market. "More than half the
planet's soil carbon pool is sequestered in the peatlands of the
Northern Hemisphere." Extracting it releases enormous amounts of carbon AND destroys non-renewable habitats. Happily, we have a much more benign alternative.
And I'm going to add one last thing from outside of this book:
7) Return/don't remove nutrition to/from the plots. Soil nutrition is a circle we break all the time. We are removing nutrients each time we harvest and take produce off site, or throw away the scraps instead of reusing the nutrients. Whatever we can leave behind -- either as a mulch or added to the compost heap -- will reduce nutrient loss.
