How green is your garden, really? Give your garden a spring tune-up, the environment will thank you.

1. Plant native plants indigenous to your home province. They know how to grow on your home turf without the help of pesticides and excessive amounts of H2O, plus you’ll be attracting plenty of biodiversity to your garden (for a list of recommended trees, shrubs and plants native to your province, see evergreen.ca).

2. Ditch the water-thirsty lawn. If you do have grass, go with low-mow, low-maintenance rye or rescue.

3. Get a rain barrel. Why waste rain-water when you could be feeding it to your plants all summer long?

4. Turn sprinklers on once a week max, and only in the morning or evening, when the sun ain’t beatin’ down, so you don’t lose water to evaporation.

5. Grow your own organic veggies! You can’t get a more local and nutritious food source. Any produce you can’t eat yourself, donate to a shelter (growarow.org).

6. Preserve a piece of history by planting heirloom tomatoes, beets, flowers and more that haven’t been genetically modified or hybridized. Check out Seeds of Diversity’s annual heirloom seed swap (seeds.ca).

7. Ditch chemical pesticides and reach for homemade solutions.

8. Turn in your two-stroke gas mower and swap it for the push-powered kind or an exhaust-free electric mower (mowdownpollution.ca). You can even snag yourself a solar-powered mower for a little extra cash (solarispowerproducts.com).Home Depot’s carrying them now.

- by Adria Vasil, author of Ecoholic Home

Excerpted from Ecoholic Home Copyright © 2009 by Adria Vasil. Excerpted by permission of Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved.

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