Green Garden - 緑の庭

One of the most satisfying ways to become a steward of the planet is to plant a garden. You can grow flowers to beautify indoors and out or vegetables to help to sustain your family’s food or both. Even if you aren’t interested in maintaining a garden, you can also plant native plants to cut down on the amount of watering that is necessary and contribute to the health of the earth. But many people these days are turning to organic gardening and permaculture to tend their backyards or front yards, for that matter.
Let’s begin with organic gardening which at its simplest can be defined as gardening without chemicals. It’s interesting to consider that it’s only for the last few decades that anything other than organic gardening was performed on the planet. Farmers and gardeners worked the soil through organic means for millennial. But then in the 1920s, mass farming became more and more the means through which our food was grown, and it depended on high yields, quick growth and more profitable methods. This came to mean reliance on chemicals and fertilizers with little care or concern for the long-term impact of these products. And these ideas spilled over to urban and suburban gardeners, who wanted the greenest lawns, and the lushest roses with little concern for the consequences of the chemicals they used.
But many commercial pesticides such as DDT have been outlawed and gradually more and more attention has been paid to the pitfalls of mass farming and gardening with chemicals. Now most home gardeners would agree that organic gardening is the way to go, and it has come to mean a whole approach to gardening that is a balanced way of looking at things.
While we are planting green things in our garden, let’s not forget trees. We have learned the fact about the devastating consequences of global warming and how it is in many ways unstoppable unless we stop our actions and change our ways. One of the best ways to restore our air and ecosystem is to plant trees. Why? Because trees take in carbon dioxide and change it to oxygen, then releasing more pure oxygen into the air. Trees function as the lungs of our planet. A mature tree can absorb up to 48 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and in turn releases enough oxygen for 2 people
And, beyond that, they create habitat for birds and other wild creatures and they are aesthetically pleasing as well. They help restore ozone levels in urban areas and reduce runoff and erosion. They absorb sound, reduce noise pollution, and create shade. And, trees have repeatedly been shown to improve both mental and emotional health and physical health of people. With all these benefits, you can understand why planting trees is such an eco-friendly activity.