I was a bit discouraged to hear that the CO2 the plants remove is ultimately rereleased into the atmosphere when the plant decomposes. So I’m wondering what positive impacts I’m making with my backyard garden, if any.
Also, with millions of gardens, would they really be totally useless for CO2 removal? Or is there some small amount that gets captured by the plant and then *not* rereleased into the atmosphere, in other words, permanently removed from the air?
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If anything most gardens only make things a tiny bit worse.
The carbon of the CO2 gets stored in the plants.
It is bound up in the carbon is bound in the wood and the leaves of a tree for example.
If you burn the wood later it will release the carbon again.
If you let dead plants rot it will release the carbon again.
The carbon doesn’t stay bound. If you want to bind more carbon you either need to increase the overall mass of plants dramatically or you need to sequester plantmass in the ground in a way that will make it stay there long term.
Peat bogs are a good way to do to that, but most people don’t have those in their gardens.
What they mostly have is lawn and they mow that lawn. and either burn or compost most of the cuttings.
This is a useless mono culture that does little good for the environment but suck up precious water that might be of better use elsewhere.
Best case scenario is a vegetable garden. That won’t help capture carbon since you eat all the vegetables and exhale the carbon as CO2 again, but at least less fuel is burned transporting food around.
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