Planting native species in your yard is one of the best ways to help filter run-off and keep pollution out of our drinking water.
Even if your yard currently includes grass, there are things you can do to minimize the damage to our environment. Organic lawn care is one way to keep your grass and reduce your impact to our drinking water. There are a number of steps you can take to make your yard even more earth-friendly as a responsible gardener and resident of our watershed.
1. Don't be overly generous with fertilizers: Fertilizers containing phosporus are banned in the watershed. Even organic, composted animal wastes are often high in phosphorus. As runoff, this can lead to algae blooms and degrade water quality. This is currently the biggest threat to our drinking water.
2. Pay attention to equipment: Lawn mowers, leaf blowers and weed-trimmers are good labor-saving devices but produce smoke and noise as byproducts. Consider going electric rather than burning fossil fuel. Or use push power, in the case of the old reel mowers. The manual mowers are especially useful on small patches of lawn.
3. Adopt smart watering habits: Add mulch and compost to your soils to hold water and reduce evaporation. Choose low water-use plants or grasses that can thrive on rainfall alone once they're established. Information on native plants can be found at:
http://www.wnps.org/landscaping/plantselect.html
http://wildflower.utexas.edu/?region=Northwest
Also, soaker hoses or drip irrigation can save 50 percent over sprinkler use. Do your watering early in the day to avoid evaporation and winds.
4. Adopt the federal Environmental Protection Agency's "4 R's" GreenScapes program: Recycle, reuse, reduce and rethink. In the latter case, buy products that have a better environmental profile than those you may be using; solar landscape lighting, for instance.
5. Make composts from yard and kitchen scraps, a practice that also fits under recycling. Compost or "gardener's gold" can be used for many purposes from potting plants to boosting soil nutrients in natural lawns. It saves money over the commercial product, too.
Simple changes in the way we do things can dramatically reduce our environmental footprint.