Becoming an organic-regenerative gardener is worth every effort, helping you produce healthier crops and connect to Nature. The good news is that implementing sustainable practices in your garden can be as simple or complicated as you’d like; many different projects and efforts contribute meaningfully to the health of your plants and surrounding ecosystems. Looking for ideas? Try these 5 Cool Ways to Create an Eco-Friendly & Sustainable Garden Space.

Start with Soil

One of the most powerful things you can do as a gardener is to treat your dirt like gold. Living soil will help you grow productive gardens while protecting a precious resource. Forget chemical products; compost is your best friend. You can create a composting system that works for you, regardless of your space. Adding organic matter to your garden instantly boosts soil nutrient content, creates air pockets, and helps the earth better retain moisture. Leave no patch of soil uncovered; always mulch your garden space. Covering the earth with a layer of wood chips or leaf mold will prevent water evaporation and add nutrients to the soil as it decomposes. Consider sheet mulching (lasagna gardening) and hugelkultur beds to build nutrient-rich earth while saving water. And avoid digging if you can. Leaving life below the garden surface intact while nourishing it is a top priority. Stepanie Rose’s The Regenerative Garden: 80 Practical Projects for Creating a Self-Sustaining Garden Ecosystem is an excellent resource for gardeners leading the change.

Support Wildlife

We do so much to keep certain critters out of our gardens; don’t forget to put the welcome sign on the gate for many others. Supporting wildlife and making safe spaces for them is essential to thriving ecosystems, and it can be a lot of fun, too. Build some insect hotels or leave stumps or pieces of driftwood in the garden for beneficial bugs to move into so they can help you with pest control. Strategically place birdhouses, baths, or feeders and plant berry bushes to encourage our feathered friends to pop by. Design pollinator islands that include a wide variety of mostly native and only chemical-free plants. Between bee balm and liatris for the bees, coneflowers and milkweed for the butterflies, and foxglove and honeysuckle for the hummingbirds, you’ll end up with a downright gorgeous flower buffet to please the essential pollinators that help your garden grow.

Stop Weeding

We often hear that we need to go back to our roots, and the saying is true for many different reasons. In The Climate Change Garden: Down to Earth Advice for Growing a Resilient Garden, Sally Morgan and Kim Stoddart write about how gardens of the past were rarely decorative and served the functional purpose of growing food for the family. Weeds were encouraged to grow alongside crops for their medicinal properties and ability to attract pollinators and beneficial insects to the garden. Plus, keeping every inch of ground covered was essential for retaining moisture in the summer, nutrients in the winter, and preventing soil erosion. Take a page from the past; let plants like chickweed, lamb’s quarters, and ox-tongue self-seed and grow alongside other plants. They’re beautiful in their own right and create the cottage garden look everyone longs for these days. Fighting Mother Nature is too much work; let her do her thing and reap all the benefits.

Build a Wicking Bed

Wicking beds are an exciting option for water-conscious gardeners. These large, DIY container-like gardens capture water runoff and store it in a reservoir under the bed’s soil so it’s readily available for the plant roots whenever needed. Kiss the garden hose goodbye and say hello to healthy crops with strong roots! You can build wicking beds in the ground or as a raised garden, preferably with recycled materials or cedar posts. You’ll need an impermeable barrier at the bottom to act as the reservoir, drainage pipes for water flow, and gravel to store the water. Place garden fabric on the gravel and fill the bed with soil and plants. You can water the wicking bed manually (about once a week in thesummer) or connect downspouts to the garden and let the rain do the job for you. The Regenerative Garden (Rose) offers excellent step-by-step guides to building wicking beds, keyhole gardens, herb spirals, and more.

Reuse and Recycle

Finding creative ways to use things you already have in the garden is budget-friendly and reduces the amount of waste in landfills (or sitting in your shed). In their book, The Urban Garden: 101 Ways to Grow Food and Beauty in the City, Kathy Jentz and Teri Speight encourage gardeners to find new purposes for items rather than buying new ones. Doing so adds layers of history and depth to the garden because it connects you to previous gardeners and owners or past experiences. Anything that holds soil can be a planter if you create drainage holes. Old bathtubs, sinks, rain boots, and metal trucks can all be used as containers. An old brass bed frame makes a garden trellis and metal chairs can be placed anywhere to create a cozy relaxation and garden observation spot. Grow vertically in repurposed rain gutters and edge garden beds with rocks from your travels, old cinder blocks, or terracotta roof tiles. Finally, Jentz and Speight warn never to throw out broken garden tools. Have a bucket handy to collect broken parts; you can eventually put something together with the pieces. Besides, old rake heads make great hanging racks for garden gloves and small tools!

For many years, gardeners have known the rules: start seeds indoors and nurture them until they’re ready to be planted outside. Don’t forget to harden them off! And for the love of God, space them properly in tidy rows or forget any harvests. Now, imagine not doing any of that, grabbing a packet of seeds and casting them haphazardly throughout the garden space. Relinquish all control and see what sprouts. Is your chest feeling tight? Welcome to Chaos Gardening.

“Chaos is meant to be disruptive. It’s meant to make you uncomfortable, and that’s how we learn best,” says award-winning author and gardener Stephanie Rose. “I don’t feel that gardening needs to be so planned and so maintained.”

Rose should know. She’s an herbalist, permaculturist, and the author of several books, including two of my personal favorites, Garden Alchemy and The Regenerative Garden. Both books guide gardeners through working with nature and restoring the planet while growing productive, sustainable home garden spaces that don’t require much work. Rose’s love for regenerative gardening jumps off her pages, and after our recent video chat, I can confirm her passion is contagious. Rose has a way of making you want to do better, and it helps that she offers concrete and easy ways to achieve that goal in her books. During our talk, she tells me about her recent lawn adventures at her new home in Vancouver, BC, where she’s defying all of the traditional rules of growing grass. Rose didn’t prepare the land or buy truckloads of new soil. Instead, she pulled up the existing pieces of grass, planted 1,500 bulbs, covered them back up, and tossed a wildflower turf alternative over some compost mixed with sand.

Credit: Eduardo Cristo

“It is complete chaos,” she admits. “And I did it two months before the seed packets said I could do this.”

She’s at nature’s mercy and is perfectly fine with that. Rose is expecting some losses. Whatever grows is meant to be there; anything that doesn’t would never have survived, anyway. She’s open to learning from the plants and creating her space based on what they tell her.

“If we have too much ego going into chaos gardening, then that’s where we will not succeed,” she says. “If we go in with humility and an open mind to learn, then we will be able to grow as gardeners as our gardens grow with us.”

Garden Trends

Chaos gardening is all the rage, trending on TikTok and Instagram. Videos of ‘chaos carrots’ popping up in random garden spots are getting over a million views. The new generation of gardeners is keen on ditching the traditional growing rules and the constant work typically associated with tending plants. Rose believes today’s gardeners understand they must correct many mistakes from the past, and that’s why the topic is trending. They want to toss carrot seeds and wildflower seed bombs into bare garden spaces and see what happens. They don’t want structured gardens with tall plants in the back, shorter ones in the front, and dyed mulch between them. They’re ready to move away from the perfectly manicured lawns that are weed-free yet dying of thirst.

Credit: Stephanie Rose

“The generation coming up sees this as lawful evil because it’s not supportive of our environment,” Rose says. “It is so much labor, and they’re thinking about a whole generation of people who didn’t garden because they could see how much work it was.”

The Trade-Off

Chaos gardening is the definition of low-maintenance. Rose recommends researching the plants that do well in your region and buying seeds that speak to you. Cast the seeds widely and often, forgetting about spacing completely. Water and see what grows.

“You’re going to have far lower germination rates than you would if you followed [directions] and had done it in a greenhouse and set all the plants out,” she says. “However, seeds are inexpensive. Your time is valuable. Your energy is valuable, so you’re doing a bit of a trade-off here.”

As the plants grow, you will notice some varieties thriving more than others. When they establish, Rose recommends digging up anything that doesn’t fit the space properly and placing it elsewhere in the garden. It’s as simple as that, and that is regenerative gardening. Or, should we say, chaos gardening?

“Well, it’s just a different name for the same thing, right?” Rose explains. “But I love where this is coming from because this is a whole new generation embracing the idea of chaos as something positive.”

Sowing Chaos

Russell Taylor, vice president of Live Earth Products and international Certified Crop Advisor, turned to chaos gardening as an act of desperation.

“I had an area in front of my house and planted some boxwoods, but they died. And then I planted a small pink Japonise willow, and that died,” he recalls. “I just couldn’t get anything to grow. I had to have something green. I cleaned out the seed bin, threw it out in front of the house, and what grew is what grew.”

Today, he has a beautiful self-propagating area of zinnias and salvia growing outside his front door. That’s what nature intended for his space, and Taylor has learned to listen and embrace the chaos. He also experiments with vegetable crops and fresh herbs, randomly sprinkling radish, spinach, arugula, kale, and cabbage seeds throughout his raised beds. Strawberries roam around the base of his asparagus plants. He planted dill ten years ago and hasn’t replanted it since; the herb just won’t quit! Taylor suggests watching these more invasive crops to give others a fighting chance, thinning as needed.

Russell’s volunteer dill plants hard at work

“Carrots, for example, whether it’s chaos-seeded or planned, if they’re too crowded, they don’t get the proper nutrients,” he says. “So, you thin them. One of the keys is to say, ‘We sowed some chaos. Now let’s get some organization, so these things aren’t competing too much.’”

Taylor is a soil guy, so he stresses the importance of building living earth to allow the plants to reach their full potential. He also recommends understanding seed habits, especially if you live in a small space where porch and patio varieties are better than anything indeterminate.

Small and Indoor Spaces

Rose sees no reason why people living in small spaces shouldn’t scatter seeds in a pot and watch them grow. She also encourages indoor gardeners to get in on the chaos on their windowsills or wall planters. Culinary herbs are an excellent start, but we can take things further by regrowing food from kitchen scraps in water. These crops may not be as productive as the ones growing outdoors, but something is always better than nothing.

“Great mistakes are how we learn,” she says. “The biggest thing to watch out for [with chaos gardening] is not being open to what the lessons are.”

Credit: Stephanie Rose, Garden Therapy

Nature’s Lead

Luckily, nature’s lessons are everywhere in our gardens, meadows, and forests. Crowded plants die back in natural settings, allowing others to intermingle and thrive. Dense woodland plantings provide living mulch, preventing soil erosion and water evaporation. They also offer habitat to beneficial insects and other wildlife. It’s chaotic, regenerative, and wonderful.

So, don’t be afraid. Gather seeds you love and scatter them throughout the garden like nobody’s watching. Don’t worry about spacing, density, losses, or any other great mistakes you might make. See what grows, be excited about nature’s surprises, and learn from them. Most of all, let loose and embrace the chaos.