Brackley Care Home's green vision

We all know that the foundation of a great, green garden is the quality of the soil and compost. However, the next most important component in any garden is encouraging our local wildlife. Without our birds, bees, hedgehogs, foxes, and on one occasion a weasel, our garden would be overrun with greenfly, blackfly, slugs and snails, which in turn would harm our flowers and vegetable plants.

We have linked up with Brackley Hogwatch which is an amazing charity that monitors, protects and rehabilitates hedgehogs. We have been further educated and learnt so much more about these amazing little creatures which eat insects and are extremely important in maintaining the balance of the garden ecosystem. They help us eliminate small animals that can damage the plants in our gardens and are vitally important for conserving biodiversity. We were lucky enough to have a hedgehog house donated to us and we have placed that in a quiet sheltered spot in our garden.

We do have the occasional inquisitive squirrel that visits our garden to raid the bird feeders but we don’t encourage them as they carry diseases, typhus and ringworm being just two as well as parasites such as ticks, fleas and mites and are also known to raid nests to steal baby birds.

Over the past couple of years we have been encouraging birds to visit our garden and take up residence in the nesting boxes which were decorated by our residents and placed in sheltered places around the home. This year we have been rewarded with our own brood of Blue Tits and a family of Robins are currently nesting whilst some Pied Wagtails have just fledged from their nest which they built on the ground, hidden in the foliage. Our residents also decorated bug boxes which have been placed along our fence and these will encourage ladybirds, solitary bees, solitary wasps, spiders and wood lice which perform the necessary task of breaking down leaf matter. We also raised some caterpillars which we do every year and these turned into beautiful Painted Lady butterflies which we released into the garden.

This is testament to our ongoing efforts to encourage wildlife into our garden, which was started from scratch in 2020.