Creating an ecological garden is a matter of patience. It is through a multitude of small gestures that you will install gradually a living environment, favorable to healthy plants, where the populations of pests will regulate themselves. The use of treatment products and biological insecticides will then be enough for your flowers and vegetables to be in good shape.
In doing so, you will help protect soil, air, and water in your environment from the pollution caused by chemicals. Not to mention that you will limit your consumption of water and energy!
1.Recycle garbage from home and garden
To create an ecological garden, recycle! Recover natural materials from the house and yard and transform them.
Make your compost
In a composter, remove various organic materials such as grass clippings, withered flowers, peelings of fruits and vegetables, dry bread, fruits and vegetables too advanced to be consumed, paper tissues, etc.
You will get beneficial compost both as an amendment and as a natural (and free) fertilizer for your garden.
Make your BRF (fragmented rameal wood)
The BRF is the result of grinding freshly cut small diameter branches. Spread and then incorporated a season later on the ground, it can significantly improve its structure and acts as a potent fertilizer.
Make his BRF (fragmented ramial wood) and use it
2.Promote biodiversity for an ecological garden
The biodiversity in the garden designates among others:
- the presence of varied plants, as native as possible, with ideally a wildland area in the natural state;
- the presence of an auxiliary fauna that you will protect and attract by establishing hedgerows, leaving piles of stones and other hiding places for small animals, by building shelters for birds and bats or insect hotels.
Your garden will become a living environment in which ecological equilibrium will gradually set in place naturally, with fewer diseases and automatic regulation of insects and pests.
Promote biodiversity in the garden
3.Adapt your tillage techniques
In an ecological garden, we limit as much as possible or even remove the digging :
- Replace whenever possible the use of the spade by that of the grelinette :
- you will respect the natural soil ecosystem and avoid destroying microorganisms and earthworms that help to aerate and loosen the land;
- you will naturally improve soil fertility.
- If you want to go further, adopt the no-till technique that removes all work from the soil: it involves covering the earth with 4 to 5 cm of organic matter and leaving this mulch in place for several months so that earthworms and soil micro-organisms transform the ground under mulch into the fine organic matter.
4.Adopt mulching
The soil mulching is an environmentally friendly technology with many advantages in the garden:
- It limits weed control and the use of chemical herbicides.
- Also, it allows less water and thus saves water.
- It protects the soil from erosion caused by heavy rains.
- If the mulching is vegetal (grass clippings, etc.) or organic (compost, manure), it improves the life and fertility of the soil by decomposing.
5. Plant plants adapted to your climate and soil
Plant in the pleasure garden, vegetable garden or orchard plants chosen according to the environment, the local conditions and your soil :
- Respect the hardiness zones (cold resistance).
- Choose plants adapted to your soil (clay and heavy, sandy, limestone, etc.).
- Supply yourself at local nursery workers who will sell you plants grown in your area, offering the best conditions of recovery.
Your plants will be robust, naturally healthy, which will limit your use of amendments, fertilizers and treatment products.
6.Use plant associations and companion plants
The principle of plant associations applies mainly to the vegetable garden, sometimes to the orchard and the pleasure garden. It allows to obtain several measurable results in an ecological garden:
- Favor the growth of certain cultivated plants close to each other: for example, dill stimulates the growth of cucumbers …
- Avoid plants preventing the growth of neighboring plants: for example, potatoes and tomatoes prevent each other from growing well.
- To fight against certain diseases: for example, the aromatic plants (lavender, chives …) limit the disorders of the roses; garlic and onion limit peach blister and apple scab.
- To keep away insects and other pests: forget-me-nots planted near raspberries limit raspberry worm invasions; worries planted in the vegetable garden repel the aphids, the irrigation. and the beetles; planted near rosebushes, they also define aphid invasions …
7.Practice crop rotation
Crop rotation is mainly applied to the vegetable garden, where you have to avoid growing the same vegetables two years in a row at the same place, which limits:
- depletion of soil resources in mineral elements;
- the spread of diseases;
- the multiplication of harmful insects.
At the pleasure garden, there are also examples: for example, do not replant a rose bush in the exact location where you had grown another.
8.Eliminate chemical pesticides and insecticides
When it comes to eco-gardening, keep in mind that prevention is always better than cure. If you apply the rules outlined in steps 1-7 above, you have already taken a considerable step in prevention.
However, if it is still necessary to treat individual plants that are prone to diseases:
- operate as a priority preventively (for example your roses, your fruit trees, your tomatoes);
- or address as soon as the first signs of illness or infestation appear.
In all cases, replace chemical treatments with all-natural treatments :
- Purines, decoctions and herbal infusions made by yourself or purchased commercially.
- Introduction of insects or larvae useful in the garden, such as ladybird larvae that eat aphids.
- Thuringian bacillus: natural bacterium, harmless for the environment and the fauna, packaged in powder, which makes it possible to fight against several parasites (moths, caterpillars, leaflets, leafminers).
- Other organic treatments: black soap, baking soda, cinnamon, milk-based solution …
9. Use natural fertilizers for an ecological garden
By adopting organic gardening practices, you will need less fertilizer. When you do it, use natural fertilizers:
- Compost and manure: these are both amendments, which improve the structure of your soil, and fertilizers that provide nutrients.
- Green Fertilizers (phacelia, vetch …): sow them on an empty plot. In autumn, cut them, crush them and bury them in the ground.
- Plant purines: in addition to their properties against diseases, some also constitute excellent fertilizers (comfrey, nettle …).
- Commercial organic fertilizers: dried blood, ground horn, guano, seaweed, bone powder, castor cake …
10. Save water and energy
Save water
- At the pleasure garden, choose plants that need little or no watering.
- Use the right watering methods: for example, in the garden, opt for drip irrigation .
- Straw your plants to limit the evaporation of water.
- Finally, install a rainwater collector.