10 ways to save the planet while gardening

Gardening, and how we garden, can make a positive difference to several of Earth’s biggest challenges. Here’s how to garden sustainably

We know that wildlife gardening, and engaging with wildlife in our gardens, benefits our wellbeing. Recent RHS Science research has also found that gardening in a more sustainable way is better for our wellbeing.

When it’s good for the planet, and good for us too, why wouldn’t we choose to garden in a more sustainable way?

Gardening sustainably is easier than it sounds. Sometimes, it’s just a question of not doing something. Other times, it’s just making a small change that can actually save you work.

Whatever size your garden, or even if you just have a few pots, you can make a difference with these easy steps. How many of these 10 ways to be a sustainable gardener are you doing in your garden?

10 ways to be more sustainable in your garden

1. Go peat-free

Traditionally often used in bagged composts, peat is a natural resource that forms over thousands of years in peat bogs. These peatlands are vital for capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere, and are unique habitats for a range of wildlife.

In fact, peatlands globally store over twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined, despite covering an area ten times smaller. To help combat climate change, it’s vital to stop using peat in horticulture.

There are lots of high-quality peat-free composts available. Make sure to look for a compost that says ‘peat-free’ on the bag. It’s worth trying different brands to find one that works well for you. Bagged compost may start to lose some nutrient value after around six months, so if you’re only using a small amount at once, sharing a bag with a neighbour can be a great idea.

If you’re unsure and want to be certain the compost you’re buying is peat-free, check our list of garden centres and retailers that only stock peat-free composts.

To avoid peat in your garden altogether, look to only buy peat-free plants where possible. Check our list of peat-free nurseries to find out where to buy plants that are verified 100% peat-free.

Visit our peat-free hub to find out everything you need to know about peat and going peat-free, and spread the word to friends, family and neighbours. Asking for peat-free plants at your local garden centre will also help put pressure on retailers to move away from peat.

2. Make your own compost

A compost heap is a win-win in any garden. Composting is the most environmentally friendly way to recycle your garden waste and feed your plants with the product – and it’s free.

You’ll save money on feed and bought-in soil improvers and mulches, with their associated travel miles and plastic. You may even be able to ditch your council green waste subscription. Open compost heaps are also an important habitat for garden wildlife, and help increase garden biodiversity.

Set aside a small, out-of-the-way corner of your garden for a compost heap. You can recycle garden and food waste into nutritious plant food through composting or using a wormery, which takes up least space of all – it can even go in a corner of the shed or garage.

3. Go water-neutral

Collecting your own rainwater is an essential part of gardening sustainably. Collecting rainwater not only lowers your water bill; it saves mains water as this becomes an increasingly precious resource, and also helps to reduce your house and garden’s contribution to flooding, by reducing the amount of rainwater running off hard surfaces into drainage systems that can become overwhelmed.

Minimising the area covered by impermeable materials will really help with reducing your garden’s runoff too. Try to minimise tarmac and paved areas, instead prioritising planted areas and materials that water can filter through such as gravel or crushed rubble. You might need to use your front garden for parking, but does it really need to be fully paved or tarmacked, or can you just have two strips of hardstanding for wheels, surrounded by a permeable surface incoporating some lovely plants for driveways?

Find out more about collecting rainwater and other ways you can pledge to use less mains water on Mains2Rains

There are other ways you can reduce your garden water use. You can use greywater – waste water from household processes such as washing up and baths – for watering, though it’s best to avoid using greywater on edible crops that aren’t cooked.

Resist the temptation to overwater your plants. By watering only when plants visibly need it, you can train your plants to be ‘water athletes’: if plants are used to surviving on little water, they will start to get used to this and adapt to do well with less. As always, make sure you are growing the right plant in the right place – if your garden is prone to drought, choose drought-resistant plants and check our drought-resistant gardening tips.

Find out everything you need to know about managing water in your garden here

4. Minimise your inputs and avoid pesticides

Avoiding pesticides, fungicides and weedkillers is key to being a sustainable gardener. Pesticides such as bug sprays (including the organic and homemade ones) are often non-selective. This makes them detrimental to biodiversity, wiping out a wide range of beneficial garden insects, including the caterpillars of butterflies.

Though intended to target plants, weedkillers have harmful effects on wildlife too, including bees. Therefore minimising the use of harmful chemicals can help to boost biodiversity in your garden.

Focus on creating a healthy garden ecosystem that encourages natural predators such as birds and earwigs to keep numbers of plant pests in check. For example, blue tits will eat aphids. Embrace the biodiversity in your garden: even slugs and snails have critical roles in recycling dead material, so it’s only fair to tolerate the odd nibble in return – or if you need to, manage their numbers by non-chemical means.

Weeding can be considered a process of selection rather than elimination. If the plant isn’t doing any harm and is benefitting biodiversity, such as with flowers – you can leave it. Allow wild plants to grow in your lawn and enjoy watching the bees buzzing from flower to flower. Any old weedkillers at the back of the garden shed must be disposed of safely.

In general, minimise your input of chemical products as much as you can. It’s worth tolerating a bit of blackspot on your roses. Try to only feed your container-grown plants with organic feeds such as liquid seaweed (synthetic fertilisers require even more energy to produce), and feed your soil with homemade garden compost or well-rotted manure.

Excess fertiliser use – both synthetic and organic – can lead to nitrogen runoff, which harms aquatic environments, so bear in mind that many plants don’t need feeding, especially those growing in the ground.

5. Grow your own food

Not only is growing your own fruit and veg rewarding, it’s fresher and tastier, and saves on travel miles and plastic. Since you have control, you know how it was grown – for instance, you know it’s free from pesticides. Research has also shown that people who grow their own waste less food and eat more healthily.

You can grow fruit and veg even in the smallest space by choosing container-friendly crops such as salads, spinach and chard, tomatoes, compact varieties of courgette, strawberries, and much more. In a larger space, practising no-dig on your growing area will help to look after your soil – and a healthy soil underpins a healthy ecosystem and a healthy garden.

A sometimes overlooked aspect of sustainability is social sustainability. That glut of courgettes you end up handing out to neighbours is actually doing good in more ways than you might think.

“Having produce to share with others increases opportunities for social connections, bonds and care for others,” says Dr Chloe Sutcliffe, RHS Sustainable Gardening Fellow.

“Using gardening as a way to connect with others also helps increase the wellbeing benefits we can gather from it. Communal gardening provides opportunities to reduce resource use, such as through sharing and borrowing tools; divert waste streams (such as through a community compost heap if individuals lack the space); and create place-based communities, which are important for building local resilience.”

Award-winning garden designer and author Cleve West shares his insights into how growing your own food can help you be more sustainable.

“A plant-based diet is one of the easiest and healthiest ways of reducing our impact on the planet. This is because plants grown for human consumption uses less land than animal farming and saves significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. If you have an allotment or space to grow food at home, you’ll further reduce food miles and waste while getting plenty of fresh air and exercise.

“Growing your food organically, without the use of pesticides, is an added bonus, as you’ll reduce harm caused to insects and other lifeforms who are critical for a thriving ecosystem. If you can’t grow fruit and veg at home, look to buy locally and eat seasonally where possible, or think about joining a community garden where food is grown and shared.”

It’s easy to start growing your own food. Find out how with RHS Grow Your Own

6. Plant for wildlife

Even if you have very little outdoor space, you can still have a positive impact on wildlife. All you need is a few pots, or even just a windowbox, and to select the right plants to provide for them.

Check out our Plants for Pollinators and plants for birds. Try to include plants with different flowering times to cater for both early season and late season pollinators, night-flowering plants for moths and bats, and larval food plants. Including specific plants that caterpillars eat is even more important for butterfly and moth populations than providing flowers for the adults to forage from.

To maximise benefits to pollinators, try to buy plants from pesticide-free suppliers if you can. Our list of organic nurseries is a good starting point, and several of these are also peat-free. Alternatively, try growing plants from seed, or nabbing divisions or cuttings from a neighbour – which keeps costs down, too.

If you have space, a mixed hedge is an invaluable resource for a wide variety of wildlife, including birds, hedgehogs and a wide range of invertebrates.

Find everything you need to know about gardening for wildlife

7. Provide habitat and manage your garden sensitively to wildlife

Allow your lawn to be biodiverse: a lawn that is a healthy community of dandelions, daisies, buttercups, self-heal and other flowering plants is a treasure trove for pollinators compared to a monoculture of grass, and can look beautiful too. Reduce the mowing of any mowed lawns to once a fortnight to allow these to flower.

Set aside an area of your garden that you can allow to become wilder and the lawn to grow long. This provides habitat and foraging opportunities for caterpillars, helping to boost butterfly numbers in a time of alarming decline. As before, avoid using pesticides or weedkillers in the garden.

How to create lawn and mini meadow habitats

Check hedges thoroughly for nesting birds before cutting and do not disturb any you find. Ideally, don’t cut at all between March and August. Check very carefully before doing any strimming or mowing of long grass, for hedgehogs and other small animals such as frogs.

Wait until spring has set in before tidying up herbaceous plants in order to leave winter seed heads, prevent disturbing hibernating animals and ensure nesting material is available for birds.

As well as managing your garden sensitively to wildlife, it’s easy to create further habitat. Water is key, so install a pond if you have space, or if not, providing a bird bath will benefit many animals. As we’ll see next, many ‘waste’ products can also be turned into valuable habitat.

8. Deal with garden waste appropriately

How you deal with garden waste has a big impact on your sustainability in the garden. Keeping as much as possible on site for reuse, recycling or decomposition in a way that benefits ecology is a great way forwards.

“Waste is a human invention,” explains RHS Sustainable Gardening Fellow Dr Chloe Sutcliffe. “We can look to natural systems and employ principles of re-use and recycling in our gardening.”

Woody waste can be repurposed in a variety of creative and wildlife-friendly ways. Avoid bonfires, as these release carbon dioxide and other harmful gas emissions and create danger to wildlife. Instead, look to keep your woody waste on-site if possible and turn it into habitat opportunities such as dead hedges and log piles.

A dead hedge can become a real design feature, as demonstrated by The Nest at RHS Wisley. Larger woody waste can be made into log piles, which again can look really effective as a focal point under trees. Any tree stumps can be left to provide habitat for key invertebrates such as hoverflies (crucial pollinators that are the theme of this year’s Wild About Gardens campaign).

Any herbaceous material should be added to the compost heap rather than the green bin. However, you may be able to cut a corner here in the name of sustainability while making life easier for yourself. When cutting back beds in the spring, instead of taking away the cut material, try practising chop and drop. This involves leaving the cut stems of herbaceous plants in situ as an easy mulch on the beds, saving you clearing it away to the compost as well as benefitting ecology.

9. Reduce your plastic use

Plastic is everywhere: in every ocean, in the most remote glacier snow, and in our bodies. It is one of the world’s biggest crises, with microplastics and nanoplastics – tiny fragments plastic breaks up into – entering every living system, contaminating the air, water, our food and even our internal organs. It is thought that there is not a single environment left on Earth that is not polluted with nanoplastics.

While plastic leaves a shocking legacy at the end of its lifecycle, its beginnings are also grim: 99% of plastics are made from fossil fuels, with plastic production emitting four times more greenhouse gases than the global airline industry.

It is essential that we all minimise the amount of new plastic we consume. The good news is that there are many ways we can do this, including in the garden.

Always avoid using plastic tree guards, which break down into microplastics and contaminate the environment: effective biodegradable tree guards are now available. Avoid using plastic weed membranes – these aren’t effective in the long-term, and in the short term, for example to cover empty vegetable beds over winter, sheets of cardboard from old cardboard boxes can be used – just be sure to remove all plastic tape first.

Avoid buying new horticultural fleece – re-use any you have until it starts to fall apart, and then replace it with biodegradable alternatives. Always use plant-based twine for tasks such as tying in roses and climbers, never cable ties.

“Prioritise use of biodegradable, natural materials wherever you can,” says Dr Sutcliffe. “Plant ties and netting can be made from jute, cotton or coir. You can also recycle old cotton sheets or clothing to use in the garden. These materials can be added to the compost when finished with.”

“Reduce waste by sharing resources with friends and neighbours; make resources go further by learning how to take care of and maintain tools and machinery to ensure they last as long as possible; and if buying new, look for repairable tools that are if possible made from recycled materials and can be recycled.”

Unavoidable plastic, such as pots you buy plants in, should be re-used or given away to neighbours who can re-use them. However, you can look for nurseries that send plants plastic-free or bare-root to reduce how much new plastic is coming into your garden.

For raising plants, re-use your existing plastic pots and trays year after year until they start falling apart. At this point, look to biodegradable alternatives, spares neighbours are giving away, or upcycle household items: toilet paper rolls are great for sowing sweet peas and beans; mushroom tubs make great propagator lids if they are clear or seed trays if they are not; butter tubs can also be used as seed trays – just be sure to punch holes in the base of anything you’re growing plants in directly.

“In nature there’s no such thing as waste,” says award-winning garden designer Dave Green. “100% of everything that falls to the ground is broken down and reused – what a system! Did you know that only 44% of UK household waste is recycled. By using degradable products and buying recycled goods, we can improve this, and perhaps one day we’ll be as good at reuse as nature.”

Closing the circle – four ways to be a greener gardener

10. Decarbonise your garden

This may sound complex, but in practice, it’s simple: there are easy ways to reduce your garden’s use of fossil fuels.

Don’t heat your greenhouse unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you need warmth to germinate seeds in the greenhouse come spring, use a heat mat and cover young plants with a reusable lid – which could even just be an upcycled clear punnet from supermarket fruit or mushrooms.

Buy electric tools, such as mowers, where possible. Even better – buy one between neighbours and share. Did you know that the average drill is only used for 12-13 minutes in its lifetime? Much can be said for borrowing rather than buying.
It’s also important to consider embedded carbon in the gardening materials we consume. This is the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of an item, from production to delivery to consumer, and can be reduced simply by buying less.

“Trying to reduce consumption is a key strategy for reducing gardening’s carbon footprint,” she says. “As well as sharing, we should upcycle, recycle, and maintain and conserve the materials we already have, rather than buying new virgin materials. Moving towards a less intensive approach to managing gardens (less lawn-mowing and hedge-trimming) not only benefits wildlife, but also reduces energy use.”

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