From patches of wilderness to decomposing plants, turning your garden into a carbon sink isn’t just about adding lots of trees.

During World War Two, the UK ministry of agriculture encouraged gardeners to "Dig for Victory" and grow their own vegetables to help feed the country. Allotments sprung up in private gardens and public parks – even the lawns outside the Tower of London were transformed into vegetable patches.

Almost 100 years later, the "Dig for Victory" slogan has been repurposed by the UK's Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). The gardening charity aimed to mobilise the biggest gardening army since World War Two to fight the biggest threat of the 21st Century: climate change. The tools at their disposal? Planting trees, using rainwater instead of sprinklers, and making compost.

If every one of the UK's 30 million gardeners planted one medium-sized tree and let it grow to maturity, they would store the same amount of carbon as is produced by driving 284 billion miles (457 billion km), 11 million times around the planet, research by the RHS shows. If every gardener produced 190kg of compost each year, they would save the amount of carbon produced by heating half a million homes for a year.

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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220610-how-to-turn-your-garden-into-a-carbon-sink