If this weekend’s weather forecast proves accurate, a lot of Summit County residents will be working in their yards and gardens. Neighbors will be mowing, aerating, turning up flowerbeds and mapping out new garden features. In the process, we hope many will also be looking for ways to reduce their landscape’s water needs and alternatives to chemical pesticides and herbicides.
Over the past winter, Park City and Summit County citizens came out in droves to voice their support for renewed efforts to protect the environment. Now is the time to put those good intentions to work.
Every summer, outside watering accounts for a disproportionately large percentage of the available water supply and, in a quasi-desert climate, the benefits of perfectly manicured lawns and water intensive plants are questionable. Furthermore, the flowerbed extensions and exotic flora that seem so enticing each spring often become burdensome by late summer.
This spring, channel some of that green-thumb enthusiasm into making your landscape a little more Earth-friendly. Go easy on the commercial fertilizer and heavy on the compost, replace a hard-to-mow section of the lawn with a creative rock arrangement or replace the typical bed of showy annuals with a new array of drought tolerant native plants.
In addition to monitoring what they plant, it is also important, in these days of heightened concern about global warming, for homeowners to reconsider how they maintain their property. Recent statistics suggest that gas mowers are worse than cars in terms of carbon emissions. Mowers, along with a host of power tools made for gardeners, could easily cancel out any other energy conservation efforts they may be implementing.
Let’s face it, it is easy to be an armchair environmentalist. It is much tougher to pull weeds and push a hand mower than to spread a bag of toxic weed killer and fire up the riding mower.
Now that we finally have a chance to get outside to enjoy the environment, let’s not wreck it.