Take Action: Cultivate

Your challenge: Add a little green to your landscape.

• Grow food.
• Choose efficient plants.
• Use smart maintenance methods.

Grow food

With edible landscaping, the final product of your labor, water and other resources is not just pretty to look at.

Growing some of your own vegetables or fruits at UC Davis is possible, even if you live in a campus residence hall. Students and community members can rent a 200-square-foot garden plot at the Experimental College Community Garden on campus. Some of the garden plots have established fruit trees, vines, herbs and other perennials that can help boost your food production.

If you want to learn when to plant tomatoes or how to prune a grapevine, several campus resources can help. The Good Life Garden, located at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, demonstrates how to grow various edibles, hosts food-themed seminars and shares seasonal gardening tips and information on its blog. If you want to learn about organic agriculture on a larger scale, the Student Farm welcomes interns. Online gardening advice for myriad plant types is available from the UC Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners.

Choose efficient plants

An important component to sustainable landscaping is the plants you choose. The UC Davis Arboretum recommends 100 reliable perennials, groundcovers, shrubs, vines and trees especially well-suited to California environments. Many of these Arboretum All-Star plants are drought-tolerant, California natives with few pest or disease problems.

Another conservation option recently planted on campus could help you save 75 percent of the water normally needed for your lawn. UC Verde buffalograss, developed by UC scientists, is very slow growing so it needs less water and less mowing than other grass varieties. 

Use smart maintenance methods

Reduce your water, energy and chemical use while maintaining your landscape at home. You can learn about environmentally friendly gardening practices such as using mulch, water-saving irrigation systems, companion plantings and biological pest control at the UC Davis Arboretum.

Other sustainable landscaping tips:

• Save water by updating your irrigation system: Water less frequently, adjust sprinkler heads to spray the yard only and switch to drip emitters.
• Reduce air pollution by switching from a gas-powered mower — where emissions in one hour of use can match a car's emissions over 95 miles — to a push reel or electric lawn mower.