Garden Practices

Sustainability is the capacity to endure.  One approach to sustainable living, exemplified by small-scale urban transition towns and rural ecovillages, seeks to create self-reliant communities based on principles of simple living, which maximize self-sufficiency particularly in food production.  Other approaches, loosely based around new urbanism, are successfully reducing environmental impacts by altering the built environment to create and preserve sustainable cities which support sustainable transport. Residents in compact urban neighborhoods drive fewer miles, and have significantly lower environmental impacts across a range of measures, compared with those living in sprawling suburbs. Organic horticulture is the science and art of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants by following the essential principles of organic agriculture in soil building and conservation, pest management, and variety preservation.  By  influencing our community to act as organically as possible, we help to make our neighborhoods and those of the future more sustainable and healthier for the next generation. Rain barrels are water tanks which are used to collect and store rain water runoff, typically from rooftops via rain gutters. Rainwater tanks are devices for collecting and maintaining harvested rain.  Cisterns are larger tanks, often partially submerged, used for the same purpose.  Rain barrels or tanks are installed to make use of rain water for later use, reduce main-water use for economic or environmental reasons, and aid self-sufficiency, or as we like to call it, sustainability. Stored water may be used for watering gardens, agriculture, flushing toilets, in washing machines, washing cars, and also for drinking, especially when other water supplies are unavailable, expensive, or of poor quality, and that adequate care is taken that the water is not contaminated or the water is adequately filtered. Vertical and container gardening are methods of agriculture allowing plants to grow upwards when there is no room to sprawl forward.  Hanging baskets and wall containers are common examples for growing vegetables in tiny areas such as balconies and walkways.