Bank Holiday Green Gardening

Sat, May 23, 2009

Climate Change, UK Climate Change

This Bank holiday weekend sees a huge increase in the regular round of law mowing, watering and obsessive gardening habits that are synonymous with the english summer.

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Here are some interesting facts that might help us re-think gardening habits over the Bank Holiday?

  • We use 70% more water today than we did 40 years ago
  • A patio heater emits the same amount of CO2 in a year as you’d generate travelling by train for 800 miles
  • An hour’s use of a petrol lawnmower releases more than 1kg of CO2
  • On hot summer days, when supplies are tightest, over 70% of the water supply may be used for watering gardens
  • A single tree can absorb 1 tonne of CO2 over its 40 year lifespan – give or take massive variation
  • According to the carbon offset company Reduce Your CO2, swapping your petrol lawnmower for a manual can cut emissions by 36kg of CO2 every year – and knock £18 off your annual spend
  • Most of our peat use is in our gardens. Peat bogs store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forest combined but every year an area of Eire ten times the size of Monaco is dug up
  • The UK is the third largest importer of Vietnamese garden furniture – most of which comes from illegally-logged forests in South East Asia. Read more about the impact of deforestation on the climate it in our article, Buying Sustainable Wood

  • HOW CARBON EMISSIONS FROM OUR WATER STACK UP

  • One litre of mains water emits about 0.75g of CO2 according to Waterwise
  • Installing a rainwater butt can save 0.6kg of CO2 per year – equivalent to a three mile drive in your car – and up to £200 off your water bills
  • http://www.waterwise.org.uk/reducing_water_wastage_in_the_uk/press_releases/water_butt.html
  • Watering with a sprinkler uses 138 times more water than watering with an old-fashioned watering can, while a garden hose can use almost as much water in an hour as an average family of four uses in a day
  • Digging in a low volume irrigation system with a timer in a large garden can cut water use by half and the time you spend watering the garden by about 90%

This post was written by:

- who has written 872 posts on My Climate Change Garden.

I am not an experienced gardener - more of an enthusiastic amateur who learns by trial and error and who is keen to "manage" the effects of shifting weather patterns on my garden. Writing this blog is my passion and it has evolved over 12 years to inspire engagement with climate change outside our back doors, in our personal gardens and green spaces. My mission is to fertilise and expand this platform to grow a community of global gardeners communicating about the effects of climate change on our plants and exploring how each individual can make small changes in our lives to become more sustainable. The future of our gardens and #OurPlanet is in our hands - please plant your own seeds for our collective sustainable future.

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