Sustainable Backyard Tour Front Page Banner 2024

Save The Date!
2024 Backyard Tour
June 30, 2024

It’s back! A free, self-guided tour of residential yards throughout the greater St. Louis area—and now St. Charles, too– the Sustainable Backyard Tour showcases a range of green living practices, including low-impact lawn care, composting, using recycled materials, organic gardening, gardening with native plants, cultivating mushrooms, edible landscaping, water conservation, permaculture, renewable energy and more!

Save the date to take the tour! Or consider hosting!

If your low-impact yard is inviting and demonstrates some element of sustainability that the public can learn from, we invite you to consider being a host yard on this year’s tour and sharing your experience with others.

Suitable yards needn’t be perfect, elaborate or even large. As a life-celebrating event, the tour asks only that you commit to organic best-practices and refrain from using pesticides and herbicides. If you have questions about what that means, we encourage you to contact us for more information.

Hosts agree to open their yards from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and interact with visitors. More than 2000 people attend the tour overall—but with dozens of stops to choose from, most yards see closer to 100 guests.

Single family yards, apartment buildings, condos and other residential communities are eligible to host. If you have worked hard to make your yard sustainable, consider being a host.

Keep the Sustainable Backyard Tour free!

Our yearly open-yard tour of eco-friendly spaces is free for anyone to attend. Your donation enables St. Louisans to see first hand how their neighbors practice sustainable living.

“I truly believe that we are bound to each other into the fabric of the universe, down to the microbe, down to the atom, and everything contained there in.”

- p 3 Boldly Go, Wm Shatner
The Sustainable Backyard Network
2022-12-09T11:05:35-06:00
- p 3 Boldly Go, Wm Shatner

“Organic gardening offers helpful historical precedent that can inform how we move into a more sustainable future.”

- John Forti, The Heirloom Gardener (P 166) 
The Sustainable Backyard Network
2022-12-09T11:23:39-06:00
- John Forti, The Heirloom Gardener (P 166) 

“The only way to build hope is through the Earth.”

- Vandana Shiva
The Sustainable Backyard Network
2022-12-09T11:20:18-06:00
- Vandana Shiva

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”

- Henry Melvill
The Sustainable Backyard Network
2022-12-09T11:21:52-06:00
- Henry Melvill

“Are we a people now who would rather be defeated by the consequences of what we shouldn’t have done that persuaded ahead of time not to do it?”

- W. H. Auden
The Sustainable Backyard Network
2022-12-09T11:11:56-06:00
- W. H. Auden

“To gain attention, writers go off to faraway places with strange names…..when they might well look deeply into their backyards and see even more breathtaking wonders.”

- Gene Logsdon, “Gene Everlasting”
The Sustainable Backyard Network
2022-12-09T11:21:23-06:00
- Gene Logsdon, “Gene Everlasting”

“It is gardening that gives most of us our most direct and intimate experience of nature, of its satisfactions, fragility, and power.”

- Michael Pollan, Second Nature (P. 3)
The Sustainable Backyard Network
2022-12-09T11:23:09-06:00
- Michael Pollan, Second Nature (P. 3)

“In nature, nothing exists alone.”

- Rachel Carson
The Sustainable Backyard Network
2022-12-09T11:14:08-06:00
- Rachel Carson
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The Sustainable Backyard Network

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