Eco friendly Grounds Maintenance

Councils across the country are drastically reducing the amount of chemicals and pesticides they are using and investing time and money into more environmentally friendly products and methods of grounds maintenance and landscaping, in order to respond to the climate change policies that will no doubt become legal regulations, over the next few years, rather than suggested changes, as they are now.

We like to get ahead of the game, wherever possible, so we have given our whole service a look over and made as many eco friendly changes as we can in order to consider the bigger, longer-term picture of the health of the sites and gardens we look after.
Here are a just a few of the changes we have made:

We now re-cycle as many of our products as possible i.e. we use broken stone and brick from other buildings to create new paving or bedding plant areas at other sites. This save in cost is also passed onto our customers. Crunchy gravel and slate chippings are the obvious permeable alternative to solid paving, but there are lots of other materials available that we can now source – from porous asphalt and block paving to grass reinforced with recycled plastic grids.

We now employ energy saving procedures and have swapped out or installed appliances in our office and workshops, including LED lighting and re-cycled paper and eco-friendly cleaning products. We recycle 85% of our waste.

We focus on water preservation when designing an area and put in place means of collecting rainwater, to feed back into the ground.
Instead of using harsh chemicals, we now use alternative weeding methods wherever possible; spreading a 5-7.5cm (2-3inch) layer of compost or shredded bark around plants to repel weeds. It also keeps the roots snug during winter and conserves water.

We would of course root the weeds out when they are young and use a deep cultivator tool to dig as deeply into the soil to bring them up.