5 Easy Earth-friendly Garden Moves You Can Make Now

Whether you're looking to improve your landscape, grow your own vegetables, or improve the health of the planet, here's 5 easy earth-friendly garden tips that will make a difference immediately.

#1 - Compost  - Create a simple compost pile and toss plant clippings, twigs and vegetable scraps into it. Not only will you reduce the amount of trash you send to the landfill, you'll never have to buy bags of compost for your garden again.

#2 - Eliminate or reduce the use of pesticides and fertilizers - Finding effective solutions to toxic pesticides is beneficial to your health, wildlife and ground water runoff. Manually removing pests or using a simple solution of soap and water will generally solve most pest problems. Reducing the use of fertilizer in the garden will help reduce the amount of toxins that end up in our lakes and rivers.

#3 - Plant drought-tolerant and native plants - As water supplies dwindle in our state and more water restrictions are implemented, native and drought-tolerant Florida-friendly plants will become the workhorse of the Florida garden. These plants will keep your garden beautiful while using less water.

#4 - Shrink your lawn turf  - Turf grass requires lots of water and lots of maintenance. Less turf grass means less water, less time mowing edging and blowing, and less fossil fuel.

#5 - Choose mulch carefully - The process of creating mulch involves the logging of trees, bagging it in all those plastic bags and trucking it to garden centers. Definitely, not an earth-friendly process.  By using available resources such as fallen leaves and pine needles first to mulch your garden beds you'll be saving lots of $$$'s and will reduce the amount of mulch you may need to purchase. Also, planting ground covers reduces the need for mulch.

These are just a few things you can do to create a greener garden. What earth-friendly garden tips do you practice in your Florida garden?