This one is difficult for a lot of folks. Lawns are traditional, and many of us take a lot of pride in having a pristine, immaculate patch of grass. But lawns are what’s known as a ‘monoculture’, and a fairly inhospitable one at that. There are no flowers, and no cover for wildlife as we keep the grass cut short. They are also often watered frequently, even in the heat of summer, and sprayed with chemical fertilizers and weed killers. But there is good news if you’re not willing to give up that beautiful green carpet – we just have to expand our idea of what a ‘lawn’ is.

Clover is a wonderful substitute for grass, as it grows in most conditions, has flowers pollinators love, and rarely needs to be mown. For an obstinate, dry and sunny location, creeping thyme will grow unbothered where grass would need constant watering and feeding. Even by cutting grass less frequently, or leaving a strip along the fence to grow naturally, you will still be doing wildlife a favour. There are plenty of other options, including wildflower meadows, that I won’t list here – but if you’re interested, please look into all your options!

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a huge garden in order to do your own composting. Of course, if you have the space, the most ideal way to compost is with multiple composting bays that are turned and rotated throughout the year. But there are still options for those of us gardening in modest spaces. There are the black, barrel-like composters designed to sit in the corner of our gardens. And for any of us gardening on balconies or terraces, there’s vermiculture (worm bin composting), and the bokashi method, among others. The most important thing to remember when composting is that there has to be a balance between “green” and “brown”.

If you’ve ever tried composting and ended up with rancid, fly-covered sludge, you’ll understand the importance of this. The “green” part of the composting is the waste from our kitchens and gardens – vegetable and fruit leftovers, egg shells, leaves from our houseplants, tea bags (if marked as biodegradable, many contain plastics), and coffee grinds. Please don’t put meat or dairy products in your compost, as these will smell as they break down and attract pests.

The “brown” refers mostly to dried compostables, such as dead leaves, cardboard, paper towel, and any other unlaminated paper products. If it has a shiny finish, put it in the recycling. Having a good balance between these two will not only help your composting to break down faster, but it will also result in a looser end product that’s easier to work with. You will know your compost is ready to use when it has a pleasant, earthy smell. From there it can be mixed into soil, or put down on top of garden beds as a high-nutrient mulch.

This is one of the most important, so I’ll start here. In Canada, there has yet to be a push to stop the harvesting of sphagnum peat moss like there has been in other countries. If you look up peat harvesting in Canada, you’ll get a lot of positive results about sustainable harvesting, and how we’re damaging less that 1% of our peat bogs for the sake of horticultural use.

On paper, that seems minimal. But the wild fact is that our few remaining untouched peat bogs worldwide hold “more than 600 gigatonnes of carbon which represents up to 44% of all soil carbon, and exceeds the carbon stored in all other vegetation types including the world's forests”, according to a study done by IUCN. In plain terms, peat bogs worldwide are storing twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined. The bogs are also rare and delicate ecosystems, and like all wetlands they are crucial for water filtration and exponentially decrease the risk of flooding.

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