Natural Yard Care
Natural Yard Care (NYC) is a way of maintaining the beauty of your home’s landscape without relying on chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Natural Yard Care techniques will grow healthy, beautiful, and easy to care for yards and gardens that are safer for your family, pets, and the environment.
Why Should You Practice Natural Yard Care?
Chemical yard care techniques involve using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to kill weeds and insects and to stimulate vigorous plant growth. This expensive method does help to manage your landscape, but chemical yard care pollutes runoff water with toxins that harm fish and wildlife. Rain washes pesticides and fertilizers off lawns and gardens into nearby storm drains and local waterways, which then flow to streams and eventually Puget Sound.
By contrast, natural yard care uses inexpensive, simple techniques to minimize or eliminate use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides while maintaining a beautiful, vibrant landscape around your home. Natural Yard Care techniques will grow healthy, beautiful, and low maintenance yards and gardens that are safer for your family, pets, and the environment.
5 Steps to Natural Yard Care
Visit the Snohomish County Website for brochures and guides that will help you implement these five steps.
1) Build Healthy Soil
With compost and mulch your soil, and garden, will be healthier. It will also reduce your water bill, improve water quality in local streams, and transform your yard into a lower maintenance garden.
2) Plant Right for Your Site
Reduce maintenance in your garden by selecting pest- and disease-resistant plant varieties that will thrive in your site's unique conditions (sun, shade, moisture, use).
3) Practice Smart Watering
Watering too much or too little is the cause of many common plant problems in our area. You can have healthier plants, save money on water bills, and reduce runoff by learning to give your lawn and garden just what they need, and no more.
4) Think Twice Before Using Pesticides
Choose natural pest, weed and disease control methods. You can avoid costly and harmful pesticides and have a healthier, easier to care for yard.
5) Practice Natural Lawn Care
It's easy to put these steps to work in our lawns, where we use the most pesticides, fertilizer, and water, and work too hard!