Garden management and soil fertility in Flemish domestic gardens

Collectively domestic gardens form an important landscape component, but environmental and land use policies tend to ignore domestic gardens. This paper investigates nutrient cycling in domestic gardens: fertilizer and soil conditioner use, composting, removal of grass clippings and the soil fertility states in the case of Flanders (the northern part of Belgium). Data was assembled from an internet survey about garden management and a database on soil fertility of domestic gardens. The combined analysis of these data reveals new insight in the link between garden management and the chemical condition in gardens (in terms of soil carbon content, pH and phosphate). Flemish gardeners used 0.07 kg fertilizer and removed 2.3 l grass clippings per m2 garden in 2007. Meanwhile, garden soils appear to have a higher pH and phosphorus content and lawns a lower carbon content than optimal agronomic standards. These insights show that gardens are a dynamic socio-ecological system with considerable nutrient flows from and to the household and the environment, indicating the need for more detailed and systematic environmental monitoring. This way, domestic gardens can be compared to agriculture, horticulture and other land use types. This and complementary research helps to complete insights in the dynamics across complex rural and urban landscapes. Future research should take into account, among other things, prevailing practices and habits of garden owners.