Why Regenerative Gardening?
Colorado’s front range urban and suburban development has continued to expand at exponential rates. The growing land consumption depletes vital resources, increases urban temperatures, and endangers our biodiversity. As our landscape and climate continue to change, it’s more important than ever to bring responsible land stewardship to the forefront. We can do this by inviting balance back into nature right in our own backyards.
Regenerative gardening is a simple and straightforward solution that supports our natural environment while strengthening our precious ecosystems from the ground up. Kiss The Ground defines regeneration as the process of renewal, restoration, and tissue growth that makes genomes, cells, organisms, and ecosystems resilient.
It is possible to manage our needs at a small landscape scale in order to balance urban areas in a holistic way. More than 75% of the earth’s land areas are degraded. Communities and neighborhoods should be investing in regenerative gardening to prevent biodiversity loss, depleted soil, and polluted water and air. Land degradation is a driver of climate change due to the loss of topsoil, water contamination, and greenhouse gas emissions. In essence, we have created heat islands in our urban neighborhoods and cities partly due to our landscaping practices.
Our current way of landscaping is no longer sustainable. The nutrient leaching of our soil continues to expand with the use of water dependent grass, non-native plants and shrubs, as well as toxic fertilizers and pesticides.
In Lawns Into Meadows, Owen Wormser states:
Traditional American landscape
“Lawns have become something of a national obsession. We waste an enormous amount of resources every year maintaining a closely cropped area of turf that totals more than 63,000 square miles, about the size of Washington State. By another measure, over forty million acres of land in the continental United States were found to have some form of lawn on it. This massive footprint makes lawns the biggest irrigated crop grown in the United States, and it sucks up an outsized amount of fossil fuels, fertilizer, chemicals, and water. Landscape irrigation is estimated to account for nearly one-third of all residential water use, totaling nearly nine billion gallons per day or almost 13,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water.”
Climate change, along with the survival of Colorado’s ecosystem, is calling for restoring our environment to a healthy and thriving state. Our system is broken and no longer functioning as it was originally meant to. Increasing native plant biodiversity directly increases beneficial biodiversity below and above the ground as well as increasing the resiliency of surrounding ecosystems.
Photosynthesis and carbon sequestration
It all begins with soil. Maintaining reciprocal restoration through the use of holistic remedies, such as replacing your lawn with native plant gardens or using organic compost in your vegetable beds, guarantees strong and enriched soil, dispelling the misplaced belief that we need heavy chemicals to grow plants. Healthy soil promotes more organic matter and impacts water holding capacity which directly creates more plant nutrients. This process increases photosynthesis which pumps more carbon into the soil, creating a self-sustaining regenerative feedback loop.
The steps to regenerative gardening are simple and easy to implement. Starting with healthy soil, we can build beautiful gardens that bring balance back to our urban areas while saving valuable resources and creating healthy habitats for all. Our biggest challenge is to begin.
Honeywood Garden Design helps you create and build regenerative landscapes.
