If your New Year's resolutions to get fit or quit a habit have wilted in the past, horticultural experts suggest a fresh and more rewarding focus for 2026: turning your garden into a bastion of sustainability.
What is Sustainable Gardening?
With a key focus on minimising environmental impact, working in harmony with nature, and conserving vital resources like water, sustainable gardening is set to be a defining trend. It's about adopting a new, more conscious way of tending your plot.
"Sustainability is about working with the available resources in your garden and making use of everything," explains Kim Stoddart, editor of Amateur Gardening magazine. "Rather than seeing something as waste, think, 'What can I turn this into?'"
Practical Resolutions for Your Garden
Here are 11 achievable resolutions, championed by experts like Peter Jones from the Eden Project and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), to help you cultivate a greener thumb in the coming year.
1. Grow from Seed: Starting plants from seed is cost-effective, reduces plastic pot use, and offers a wider variety of plants not always available in nurseries.
2. Go Peat-Free: Peat bogs are crucial carbon stores. Choosing peat-free composts protects these vital ecosystems and reduces your garden's carbon footprint.
3. Don't Dig: The no-dig method preserves soil structure, protects beneficial fungi and organisms, and can suppress weeds naturally by using mulches.
4. Grow What You Want to Eat: "A meal with food metres, not food miles, is a joy with the benefit of greater sustainability," says Peter Jones. Focus on your favourite vegetables like tomatoes or French beans.
5. Buy Local: Reduce the carbon footprint of your plants. Opt for native species, buy from local nurseries, or accept cuttings from neighbours to ensure your plants haven't travelled far.
6. Choose the Right Plant for the Right Place: Selecting plants suited to your garden's specific soil, light, and moisture conditions means they will thrive with less intervention and fewer resources.
7. Grow Your Own Cut Flowers: Cultivating flowers for your vases avoids the environmental cost of imported, refrigerated blooms, offering seasonal beauty directly from your garden.
8. Go Native: Incorporating native plants supports local pollinators and wildlife, as they have evolved together and provide the best sources of food and habitat.
9. Companion Plant: Use plants to benefit each other. For example, grow pungent leeks or garlic among carrots to deter carrot fly, or plant sacrificial nasturtiums to lure aphids away from your brassicas.
Conserving Resources and Reducing Waste
10. Save Water: With climate change increasing drought risk, set up a water butt using a rainwater diverter. The RHS also advises adding organic matter to soil to improve its water-holding capacity.
11. Revive Your Tools: Sustainability extends to your equipment. "Look after your tools... sand them down, take them apart, give them an oil and a sharpen," Stoddart advises. Maintaining and repairing quality tools reduces waste and the need for constant new purchases.
By integrating even a few of these resolutions, you can make 2026 the year your garden becomes a more productive, vibrant, and environmentally friendly space.
