4 Simple Swaps to Make Your Garden More Sustainable – They'll Help Save You Time & Money as Well as the Planet

You don’t need to be an eco-warrior to start gardening more sustainably. Lots of sustainable gardening practices simply make sense, being better for your plants as well as the wider environment. They’re a no-brainer for you, too, because over time they’ll save time and money.

So don’t scroll on by. These four swaps are the switch-ups that bring your garden the most benefits as well as being the most straightforward to put into place. So it doesn’t matter a jot if your motives are altruistic or entirely selfish – just get them done!

Happier plants, heavier pockets and a cleaner conscience to boot? Yes please!

Switch #1 Store-Bought Compost to Homemade

Once you start making compost yourself, you’ll realise how crazy it is to throw away all of your nutritious garden waste, then buy back someone else’s well-rotted trash. Creating compost doesn’t have to be a long or messy process. A rotating bin will produce the goods in as little as six weeks and, if you choose one with two sections such as this Outsunny Tumbling Bin from Target, you can add scraps to one side while harvesting garden-ready compost from the other, for a continuous supply.

Worried that it might be a bit whiffy? Only people who don’t know how to compost have smelly bins. The trick is to balance the wet plant matter and food scraps with dry brown materials like shredded paper, cardboard, dry leaves and sawdust. Turning the compost as it decays, too, will add oxygen into the mix and prevent the anaerobic conditions that can lead to unpleasant aromas. While you need to do this with a garden fork on a standard compost heap, a rotating tumbler bin makes light work of turning.

How Much Capacity Do You Need?

Switch #2 Fertilizing to Mulching

There are a whole lot of fertilizing products on the market that promise bigger blooms and better vegetables. Which is great – but there’s a balance to be struck. If you over-feed a plant to artificially boost its growth too much, you create top-growth that can’t be supported by its root system, which means you end up having to water it a lot more.

Fertilizers do a super-useful job of delivering a highly concentrated shot of nutrients when plants need them most. But use them without supporting long-term soil fertility and structure, and good root growth by mulching borders? That’s incredibly wasteful, both of natural resources and your time.

Apply a 2–3 inch layer of any organic matter on top of the soil as a mulch in early spring or late fall, and the nutrients will slowly work their way into the ground to support your plants long-term. Then use fertilizer as for an extra boost, just when it’s needed. Mulch regularly and you’ll reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer by around 30%. If you make your own compost to use as a mulch, that’s a huge cost saving.

The same applies to potted plants. Simply refresh the top 2–4 inches of soil every year to provide long-term nutrients, rather than relying solely on plant feeds.

Switch #3 Mains Water to Rainwater

Using rainwater instead of mains water won’t just save you money on your utility bills, it’s so much better for your plants as it’s free of chlorine, fluoride and salts that can inhibit plant growth. Instead, rainwater has nitrates, a readily-absorbed source of nitrogen that fuels heathy stems and foliage. It’s also the perfect pH for plants, being slightly acidic – and municipal water is typically treated to make it slightly alkaline to prevent pipe corrosion. So not only are you feeding your plants as you water them, you're not altering your soil's natural pH levels.

Sound too good to be true? Try a little experiment for a few weeks, leaving a bucket outside to harvest rainwater and using the contents to water your houseplants. You’ll be amazed at how lush and healthy they become in a short time.

Watering your garden with harvested rainwater needn’t be any more work than turning on an outside tap. Raise your rain barrel on a stand such as this recycled design from Amazon and you can put your watering can beneath the tap. If your rain barrel has a removable lid, and most do, then you can plunge an inexpensive water pump like this from Amazon into it, and connect up a hose.

Handsome Planter-Top Rain Barrels

Switch #4 Chemical Pest Control to Natural Predators

Using chemical pesticides doesn’t just get rid of the bad guys, it kills the good guys too. So once you start relying on pesticides to control pests in your garden, you wipe out their natural predators too, so you’ll end up applying more and more chemicals, which simply makes you increasingly dependent on their use.

Getting out of this vicious circle is simple, though it won’t happen overnight. Stop using chemical pesticides and the number of pests you see in your garden will increase temporarily. But hold your nerve and, within a few days, their natural predators will arrive to feast on the abundance of food.

You can attract lots of beneficial predators to your backyard by planting nectar-rich flowers. Just one ladybug can eat around 50 aphids in a day, and their larvae have even bigger appetites – in its lifetime, a ladybug will consume about 5,000 aphids. They snack on mealybugs and scale insects too. And all you need to do to bring them into your garden is plant a few of their favourite plants like cosmos, marigolds, dill and fennel.

Lacewings love all these plants, too, and their larvae eat a wide range of insect pests.

Cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus) is the prettiest of plants and so easy to grow, and you can plant seeds now. All available from Eden Brothers, 'Apricot Lemonade' has summery tones just like its name suggests, ‘Cupcake White’ has clouds of crinkled blooms that do look just like cupcake cases, while ‘Pastel Mix’ will soften any planting scheme with muted hues.

To boost natural pest control, you can also buy live ladybugs and lacewing eggs from Natures Good Guys to help establish a population in your backyard.

Offering habitat will keep these beneficial insects in your backyard and encourage them to complete their lifecycle to produce more pest-eating helpers. Mulching your borders, letting a strip of lawn grow long, and leaving some seedheads as winter structure will provide the shelter they need.

If you’re plagued by slugs, then the very best way to control them is to add a pond to your garden. Even a small water source will attract not just frogs, toads and newts, but thrushes and blackbirds, too, who will all happily deal with your slug problem. Frogs, toads and newts will also swallow snails whole, shell and all!