Things You Can Do To Improve The Environment

  • Look before your leap! Read labels before you purchase new chemical products. Evaluate the downside or adverse effects the products. How will these products effect your health and the environment?
  • Participate in Hazardous Waste Clean-Up Day.
  • Go Wild! Give your land back to nature. Can you cut your lawn in half?
  • Plant native plants and shrubs. These will be more disease resistant and will require less water and maintenance. Learn more by contacting our local Native Plant Society.
  • Allow your summer lawn to go dormant. There is no need to water grass that's losing its luster in the heat of the summer.
  • Give up the pesticides. Where pesticides are applied, soil is depleted, beneficial insects are destroyed, and birds and wildlife die and children are 6.5 times more likely to develop leukemia.
  • Know your fertilizer! Learn to read fertilizer labels evaluating the ingredients. Some popular fertilizers kill fish and state this on the labels. Use slow release organics products only. No-phos fertilizers help the lake.
  • Plant to shelter and encourage bird and wildlife populations.
  • Protect our bats! Bats can consume up to 600 mosquitoes per hours.
  • Don't install treated lumber. Often used as edging for garden beds and driveways, it contains dangerous wood preservatives-creosote, inorganic arsenic, and pentachlorophenol-, that are released to the soil and can find their way into the lake.
  • Keep the lake clean! Do not throw Christmas trees or yard debris into the lake.
  • Search your property for areas of standing water where mosquitoes might breed.
  • Recycle whenever possible.
  • Get into the habit of composting.
  • Do not dump anything into a storm drain or drainage ditch.
  • Be selective about the products you use to wash automobiles. Buy environmentally safe products that are low in phosphates. What washes down your driveway, ends up in the lake.
  • Use sand for winter ice. Sand doesn't pollute water or injure plants.
  • Don't allow your dog to soil the sand at the beaches. Bacteria remains, even after you cleanup. Children routinely sit and play in the sand.
  • Protect our urban forest. Don't use herbicides near the roots of the trees. Fungicides destroy the beneficial fungi, which sustains our trees and the ecosystem.
  • Don't nail anything to the trees or allow ivy to climb trees. Select tree workers who don't use spikes. Spikes break through the cambium layer of bark and allow disease to enter the tree.
  • Don't dispose of pool or hot tub water by dumping it into the lake.