The Garden Clean-up: How to Spring Clean It

The Garden Clean-up: How to Spring Clean It

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If you have a garden in your home or short-term rental property then you are one step closer to being eco-friendly. This is because you are responsible for its design and more importantly, it's cleaning. Whether it’s an occasional sweep of the broom or a major spring cleaning. You have the possibility not to use any chemicals that are harmful to the environment. Instead, you can eco-clean the garden using only natural substances. Including the ones you make on your own. We are sure you know a recipe or two. But here is a more exhaustive list of eco-friendly measures you can undertake to clean your garden each new spring and keep it toxic-free.

Welcome bird species

The easiest way you can clean the garden is to have someone, or better say something, clean it for you. The ecosystem of your garden should be balanced enough to attract birds. That will help you fight off pests such as mice, caterpillars or snails. They will be frequent visitors in your garden if they have plenty of food there. So you should introduce berries and other plants which seeds birds use as food. Additionally, you can put up bird feeders and birdhouses on trees. This is an artificial way of attracting them but nevertheless efficient. If you lack water features inside the garden, then leave small water bowls near the food because birds need to drink too. The bowl should be shallow enough so they can drink water without their beaks getting in the way. Finally, you will benefit from the melodious twitter of a woodlark or a nightingale.

Also, you can create a natural habitat for some of your pets. They will cheer up your garden – peacock for example, or happy little squirrel. Go easy on the chemicals.

There are numerous luscious gardens on our planet that are verdant without a single drop of any chemical. Before you decide to go into gardening you need to have a mindset that opposes the use of chemicals. There are numerous natural measures that you can take against pests, so chemicals solutions are not mandatory. Another bad aspect of spraying pesticides and herbicides all over your garden is the fact that they are not selective, as they harm the entire ecosystem. You might want to kill a certain weed species but in the end you’ll end up destroying you petunias for good. The aforementioned birds and other small animals, like the neighbour’s cat. Can come into contact with these toxins and die from contamination. Finally, chemicals eventually seep into the ground, turning once fertile land into a barren landscape.

Professional assistance

Gardening is a sport for the soul, so it’s mostly a solo activity. However, there are areas that are hard to be cleaned and some that you simply do not know how to eco-clean on your own. For instance, how on Earth does one go about cleaning the inside of a hedgerow? Instead of constantly skipping such areas. You could consider hiring professionals to do the cleaning for you. If you are worried that they will use detrimental chemicals. Then you can rest sure, as companies such as Renew Outdoor Cleaning specialize in eco-cleaning garden spaces. As a matter of fact, more and more commercial cleaning services are switching to eco-friendly cleaning methods and they are letting their potential clientele know this.

Introducing compost

If the ground in your garden is for some reason not rich in minerals, then you are probably already adding humus to it. However, there is a more cost-effective and a more ecological way to enrich the soil. Composting is a method that requires no more than one square meter of space in the disused corner of the garden. You can recycle all the organic waste from the house. Like orange peel and enrich the ground in the garden at the same time. Also, fallen leaves will no longer make a mess of your garden in autumn as they are ideal fodder for the compost you make. If you are unsure how exactly home-made compost is generated, just search the Internet for tutorials.

Selecting the right plants

Finally, the species of plants you introduce in your garden can make a huge impact on the scale of the cleaning needed each spring. Basically, they act as filters of all kinds and have the capability to self-purify the environment. The more plants you have. The better the protection against the harmful outside elements and the greater the capacity for the garden to “clean itself,” to put it like that. As we have seen in the case of birds, plants that attract pollinators and good bugs should be in the majority. Also, avoid invasive plant species as they disrupt the natural balance.

In the end, each spring ushers in a fresh cleaning spree. However, each year you do your best to use as fewer chemicals as possible while cleaning the garden.

By Sarah Jessica Smith