Natural Yard Care

What is 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
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1) Build Healthy Soil
With compost and mulch your soil, and garden, will be healthier. It will also reduceyour water bill, improve water quality inlocal streams, and transform your yard into a lower maintenance garden.
Growing Healthy Soil
Composting

2) Plant Right for Your Site
Reduce maintenance in your garden by selecting pest- and disease-resistant plant varietiesthat will thrive in yoursite's unique conditions (sun, shade, moisture, use).
Choosing the Right Plants
The Plant List

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.
Smart Watering

4) Think Twice Before Using Pesticides
This guide offers resources and steps to natural pest, weed and disease control. You canavoid costly and harmful pesticides and have a healthier, easier to care for yard.
Natural Pest, Weed & Disease Control

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!
Natural Lawn Care

Download the Natural Yard Care guide to learn how to put these steps into practice, or visit http://www.naturalyardcare.info/