Your home’s yard, garden, or even balcony have the potential to provide essential habitat for plants and animals throughout the capital region. No matter what their size, natural spaces that you create near your home can increase biodiversity and support healthy ecosystems. Linked up with the bits of nature surrounding your home, like neighbouring yards, parks, boulevards, streams, and forests, your naturalized yard can create stepping stones or linkages that help plants and wildlife integrate into the urban landscape.
There are many benefits of gardening with biodiversity in mind:
- Conserve local biodiversity
- Create and maintain habitat and corridors for wildlife
- Attract wildlife that can help control potential pests in your yard
- Pollination for food and beautiful flowers in our region
- Return nutrients to the soil through decomposition
- Support physical and mental health by caring for the environment, providing visual interest and safer spaces that attract wildlife to view
To help make your backyard a haven for local biodiversity, provide food, water and shelter for local species and use natural gardening techniques. For species specific information, check out our Attracting Wildlife info sheet. [PDF/692KB]
Natural Gardening Techniques
- Avoid pesticides. Pesticides damage non-target plants, pets, beneficial insects and wildlife. They pollute local waterways and the ocean, and contaminate soil and groundwater Add compost.
- Add compost. It helps keep your soil loose, fertile, retain moisture and allows drainage.
- Use water wisely. Water in morning and evening when evaporation is lowest, and water at the base of plants where the roots will soak it up.
- Garden with native plants.
- Remove invasive species from your yard and avoid planting them. Watch for invasive plants in wildflower mixes and labels that say “vigorous self-seeders” or “rapid spreaders.”
- Avoid buying plants that have been treated with neonicotinoid insecticides, which can harm pollinators. Ask your local greenhouse if you aren’t sure.
- Mulch to conserve moisture, reduce weeds, add nutrients to soil as it decomposes, and provide shelter.
- Green lawn care – reduce lawn area, grasscycle by leaving grass cuttings on the lawn and let your lawn go golden.
