Want to make 2016 your most environmentally friendly year yet? We can’t tell you what to do inside the house, but we have a lot of experience with the outside. Here’s a list of 8 things you can do into 2016 for a healthier property that supports local biodiversity.

  1. 1.  Plant nectar-rich flowers to feed butterflies, bees and other pollinators. These creatures make it possible for many of your plants to seed, nut or fruit. The more you attract to your property, the more beautiful and healthy your garden will stay.
  2. 2.  Put up with a few holes in leaves from caterpillars munching on your plants. Caterpillars are food for baby birds. If you want to hear the birds every morning, feed their babies!
  3. 3.  Put up some bird boxes around your property. You can put them up in winter before the cold weather really sets in – bird boxes give your winged residents somewhere to take refuge during a storm. Help them out during the hard times and more of them will survive until spring.
  4. 4.  Make sure you clean the bird boxes out before nesting season so whoever takes up residence has a nice fresh start.
  5. bat boxes

    Bat Boxes

    5.  Put up a few bat boxes. Bats are probably the best natural way to take care of unwanted pests like mosquitos. They’re also excellent pollinators. So you get a better looking garden with fewer annoying mosquitos. Honestly, a single brown bat can chow down on as many as 1,000 mosquitos in an hour. An hour!

  6. 6.  Mulch to conserve water, but leave an area of bare soil for ground-nesting pollinators. Mulch helps reduce water evaporation and soil erosion, but your ground-nesting bees and other ground-nesting pollinators need somewhere to live.
  7. 7.  Leave a small patch of your property totally wild for creatures to live in. Helpful predator insects like dragonflies and other beneficial creatures like toads are drawn to the shelter of more natural spaces.
  8. 8.  Only use pesticides as a completely last resort. So-called natural concoctions can be just as toxic to the pollinators and other creatures you want to keep around (including humans) as chemical pesticides. The pesticides approved for use in Ontario can be found here.

So that’s it! A few things to make your 2016 more environmentally friendly than the previous year.

Happy holidays from the team at Mountview Landscaping. If you haven’t booked your 2016 service, get on it! Time is running out.