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What does sustainability mean? ➡️ How Your Garden Helps Fight Climate Change ➡️ Organic Gardening ➡️ **How Do I Compost?**
⌛ Time estimate: 10 minutes
🔊 Prefer to listen to the audio version of this section? Click over here to play it! 👂 ➡️
https://soundcloud.com/junior-jardinero/chapter-7-section-3-organic?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
<aside> 📗 As we learned in the section before, caring for plants and gardens are a great way to help our communities and the Earth. But it is also important that our gardens don’t harm our environments either. The way we do that is through Organic Gardening.
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Organic Gardening is one of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint 👣! Rather than using oil-based synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, we can use organic 🌍 practices that focus on soil improvements and pest management. When the amount of humus in the soil is increased, carbon emissions are kept out of the atmosphere ☁️.
In organic gardening, it is important to keep gardens covered with growing plants – perennial, or full-year, gardens are ideal! Mulching is another important practice in organic gardening, as is Water Conservation 💦 and Composting. Organic gardening reduces the need to purchase oil-based products which increase fossil fuel emissions ⛽ during their production and transport phases 🚗.
<aside> 📺 Watch! Check out this video on what organic gardening is!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhOrIUlrnPo
<aside> ❓ So, let’s review. What are some ways you can practice sustainable and organic gardening?
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Mulch reduces soil water losses, suppresses weeds, and protects against temperature 🌡️ extremes especially in places where it snows ❄️. By keeping the water in the soil, we can waste less water and keep the plant nice and cool. Mulch also feeds soil biology as it decomposes, helping to create healthy, living soil 🤗. Healthy soil means healthy plants! Plus adding mulch to your garden, bought or home-made, can give your garden a fresh, appealing look. 💁♀️
<aside> 👀 Let’s Try It! How does your garden look? How might adding mulch to your garden make it healthier, or look nicer? Gently add some material to your garden, around your plants, to create a mulch surface on top. Tip! Old shredded leaves or shredded newspaper work great as free mulch. You can rip these up yourself, or ask an adult to help you shred some up!
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There are lots of reasons why it is important to conserve water 💧 in your garden. Firstly, by using less water, you can save money 💰! But more importantly, when we use less water, it helps keep the ground water and streams in our area flowing
We’ve seen that one of the benefits of mulch is water conservation, but there are lots of creative ways to save water in your garden!
