Top 10 Ideas to Make your Yard Eco-Friendly
Introduction to our Top 10 Ideas to Make your Yard Eco-Friendly
One of the most exciting things about 2020 (I know, we said exciting!) was that people who were stuck in their homes rediscovered the wonderful outdoor spaces they had and came up with ways to make them even better. For 2021, we’re already looking ahead to beautiful sunny skies and backyard barbeques with members of our household - and with this comes planning to revitalize the backyard space.
During the pandemic, we seemed to collectively re-evaluate what was important. We turned to small businesses to support them when orders dried up, we made more effort to connect with friends and family when we couldn’t in person, and we thought about the impacts our consumption had on the environment.
With that in mind, let’s look at our ten favourite ways to rebuild your backyard to be good for you, and for the earth:
Water-Wise Backyard Design
Plant a Rain Garden
Bee Gardens
Ditch the Grass
Ditch the Concrete Too!
Use Local: Material, Plants, and Businesses
Go Wild
Grow Your Food
Install a Natural Pool
Install a Green Wall
Getting as excited as we are about backyards? Get in touch with us! We offer General Contracting services for the Sunshine Coast and surrounding remote islands.
1 - Water-Wise Backyard Design
Imagine living in a world where you aren’t pulling yourself out of bed at 5 AM in order to water your garden before it burns in the hot, mid-August sun. We’re pleased to report that this is possible!
A water-wise garden requires some knowledge of local climate, drought-resistant plants, and radical thinking. Rather than having a traditional lawn, your space can instead be reimagined as a massive garden! You can add all sorts of texture, colour, and shapes with a water-wise garden - and the combinations are endless. This is the moment to show off your style and taste with long-lasting perennials that need little upkeep.
How to achieve this:
Check out smaller nurseries to find a broader range of plants that can work in your space
Incorporate natural shapes and textures like rock features that double as a water director
Choose a low-lying ground cover to fill in patches and stepping stone areas.
2 - Plant a Rain Garden
A rain garden is similar to a water-wise backyard design. One difference is that the goal of a rain garden is to direct water from the roof of your house and lawn towards a lower-lying area that can then absorb and hold the water for your plants, while a water-wise garden aims to plant drought-resistant species in the yard to replace grass.
Additionally, a rain garden has an intentionally dug basin that helps absorb this directed water. We love the ecological benefits of this garden, as well as the safety it can provide for your home. In Coastal British Columbia, we often worry about moisture levels and leaks as our homes age in a temperate rainforest. Rain gardens direct the water from storms away from the foundation, helping to prevent flooded basements!
How to achieve this: We love this in-depth guide to building a rain garden from the Farmer’s Almanac. To summarise, you’ll need to plan effectively with your yard space to make sure the area you choose to drain water to will be beneficial. You can use rocks and berms to send rainfall down the basin, and certain plant species will aid in both filtering and trapping water to prevent runoff - all of which are great ideas to make your yard eco-friendly
3 - Bee Gardens
Now more than ever we need to do more for our bee species. If you’re considering getting into gardening, plant pollinator-friendly species that will attract bees and butterflies is the way to go.
Beyond the ecological benefits, it’s beautiful to see bees buzzing about your garden and is definitely an idea to make your yard eco-friendly
A bee garden is described by BC Farms and Food as a habitat for some of our most important pollinators. With this in mind, it’s important to be intentional with the plants you choose, as a lot of our assumptions about flowers aren’t true!
For example, when one thinks of a flower a bee might like, one might think of those big, beautiful hybrid flowers at garden centres. However, they’re actually often sterile, and contain little to no pollen!
How to achieve this: The BC Farms and Food website has an incredibly detailed list of native species and beneficial herbs for both you and your new buzzing friends. Try to plan your garden so it blooms from March to October, using a variety of different plant species that will target different kinds of pollinators. Additionally, plant as many native species as you can, as they will thrive best in your environment - and are preferred by the bees!
4 - Ditch the Grass
Yes, you heard me right! The traditional turf grass takes a lot of energy to maintain, both for the homeowner and for the environment. In addition to large amounts of water consumption, lawns require significant fertilizing and pest control that kill beneficial bugs and poison local water sources.
Grass lawns can be replaced by a variety of different yards, like those described above, or “meadows” that use drought-resistant grasses and low-lying wildflowers - making this an excellent idea to make your yard eco-friendly!
How to achieve this: Start your meadow by “stopping the mow!” Eden Project has a few tips to convert your lawn to a meadow, including only mowing twice a year, and removing the grass clippings to deplete the fertility of your soil.
This may sound counterintuitive, but wildflowers thrive on tough soil and will push through in more challenging conditions. You’ll see different types of flowers come through depending on the nutrients in the soil.
5 - Ditch the Concrete Too!
We tend to love the simple practicality of a concrete pad for patio spaces, especially because they are durable and don’t break down like a wooden deck will. However, landscape designers are starting to move away from concrete as it isn’t a way to make your yard eco friendly.
Concrete goes to landfill when there’s no more use for it, and what’s more - it produces significant run-off as there’s nowhere for the water to go on a hard surface. This will result in the need to water your lawns more often, as the ground is unable to store as much water.
Already have concrete? You can make your concrete better for the environment by ensuring there is no plant debris or fertilizer, both of which can leach harmful substances into streams.
How to achieve this: If you’re designing your new yard, or you’re ready to ditch the concrete pad, you can use more permeable surfaces to encourage better water absorption. For example, decomposed granite is the go-to as a gravel-type material that will allow water to trickle down into the soil, and large flat stones are used as the walking surface.
6 - Use Local: Material, Plants, and Businesses
Want to get the best sense of what eco-friendly options are right for you? Every step of the process should try to involve local businesses. Purchase your plants from a local nursery when you can, as they will likely have more native plants and a broader selection.
They will also be knowledgeable about what will work best in the space you have and may have some additional ideas on how to make your yard eco-friendly. Work with local landscape designers and suppliers who will have materials that reflect the landscape you live in.
If you have a large property, consider salvaging some of your materials, like wood features and rock. Local experts are critical to making sure what you plant and how you design your space will best fit the property you have. Otherwise, it will likely end up being a frustrating and expensive endeavor!
7 - Go Wild
Sometimes the best advice is to do nothing. This even extends to backyards! If you have a large property, you likely won’t want to put in the effort to have extensive gardens, and clear-cutting removes habitats from local flora and fauna.
Instead, consider simply letting parts of your yard go wild - to let nature take its course. The result is spaces that require no maintenance, and a beautiful, natural space to explore - making this an optimum idea to make your yard eco-friendly.
Did you Know? This benefits the local wildlife too! Going wild will give smaller animals, bugs, and plants a habitat and provide larger animals a safe “corridor” to travel through.
8 - Grow Your Food
The events of 2020 had a lot of folks trying their hand at vegetable gardening, so we put this on our list as it’s a great way to live more sustainably. Vegetable gardens have a lot of benefits for you and the environment and are an excellent idea for those who want to make their yard eco-friendly.
For example, it’s beneficial to have a hobby when stuck at home and gardening allows people to quite literally reap the fruits of their labour. Additionally, growing garden vegetables taste better, and they’re more nutrient-dense than some of the produce we purchase from the store, depending on how it’s harvested.
If you grow without pesticides (which we recommend!) it’s more eco-friendly and better for you, especially if you also use compost and homemade fertilizers rather than store-bought.
Certain herbs and vegetables attract pollinators (see #3 for the list), which will help keep the rest of your garden healthy as well. Vegetable gardens are a fantastic way to make your space useful as well as add intrigue to your garden space.
If you aren’t ready to commit to a small hobby farm, consider planting squash or cucumber in your flower beds. They are low-lying plants with interesting leaves and flowers that will change up the textures that are in your space.
9 - Install a Natural Pool
If you’ve been thinking about putting in a swimming pool in the backyard, consider a natural pool. Natural pools use filtration generated from soil and plants to create a swimming space that is safe without the need for chemicals. A natural pool is also visually stunning, with layered plant species and rock, and a dedicated filtration area that replaces the chlorine and other chemicals.
Natural pools have some drawbacks. While a swimming pool uses essentially all available space as the swimming space, a natural pool can only use 50-70% - as the rest will need to be used as the filtration system. Depending on the goals of your pool though, this could still be a benefit as the filtration system is essentially a big garden.
Additionally, installing a natural pool has a higher initial cost due to the complexity of the install, while a swimming pool is significantly less. However, if you plan to stay in your property long term, the costs will likely even out as the water of a natural pool requires significantly less work.
How to Achieve this: Ecohome has put together a great list of pros and cons to installing a natural pool, as well as a variety of eye-catching designs and installs in a variety of sizes. We would recommend checking them out for inspiration!
10 - Install a Green Wall
A green wall is a structure that allows you to grow vertically, rather than horizontally which makes this the perfect final idea to make your yard eco-friendly in our list. There are so many different ways to achieve this including wall-mounted containers, ladder style structures that are angled to allow more light, and professionally mounted walls that use custom-built frames.
The benefits to a green wall include privacy, noise dampening (for inside the home,) and it is aesthetically pleasing. When it fully grows in it can easily be a feature of your home.
How to Achieve this: There’s a variety of different ways to start your green wall. If you aren’t ready to fully invest, you can use old pallets to convert them into a vertical garden. If you’re looking for a more professional solution, UrbanStrong has some great examples of constructed and customized wall solutions.
To Summarise our Top 10 Ideas to Make your Yard Eco-Friendly
In this post, we went over some of our favourite ways to redesign your backyard to be eco-friendly - while still being aesthetically pleasing. The post went over a variety of different styles, but it seems that the first steps are to reconsider that lawn and concrete pad!
Other advice included planting native species of plants that are lower maintenance and preferred by bees. Beyond this, there are so many opportunities to customize your space and add your flavour!
Getting started with a big yard project can seem a bit daunting, but luckily, we can help. As general contractors for the Sunshine Coast, we can help you with all sorts of projects! We specialize in net-zero and passive homes, in addition to renovations, custom builds, and general contracting. Want to get in touch? Contact us to get started.