Celebrating Earth Day in the Garden

This post was inspired by Jan of Thanks for Today, who has started the "Garden Bloggers Sustainable Living" initiative in honor of Earth Day on April 22, 2010. Jan is collecting links to Earth Day garden posts and even awarding gardening prizes to participants through a drawing. It's worth taking a look at her post on this, where you can also find a list of posts on the subject by other bloggers. Here's her logo for this project:

We, too, are trying to adhere to earth-friendly principles in our garden. Among these are:

Composting everything possible, both from the garden and from the household, here are my heaps and bins (click any photo to enlarge):

No pesticides of any kind, no chemical fertilizers. I wrote an earlier post on my attempt to deal with slugs in an earth-friendly way.

Collecting rain for watering. On the left-hand corner of our allotment cottage you can see one of the blue rain barrels fed by the roof:

Encouraging wildlife to feel at home in the garden. In the spring we will be putting up a wild bee "hotel" to provide a home for these endangered species, with the added benefit of pollination. Here's our model, purchased from a workshop employing the disabled (photo taken from their website):

We also make sure to leave a few untended places in the garden, hoping a hedgehog might someday make its home here:

Letting the grass grow. This sometimes rewards us with such mushrooms:

Purchasing cut flowers from Fairtrade dealers. My last post was on this subject if you're interested. I'm really pleased with the Fairtrade roses I purchased for Valentine's Day. Not only were they grown under earth-friendly (and humane) conditions, they simply last and last. On the left you can see the roses when I bought them on Feb. 13, on the right the way they look today, 5 days later and still going strong, opening up beautifully.

Happy Earth Day everyone!