Hooray! It’s National Gardening Week this month… From April the 27th gardeners across the country will be celebrating by tidying, weeding, digging, sowing and planting – generally having a lovely time enjoying their gardens, and we’ll be doing exactly the same. Let’s just hope the rain stays away!
Bringing nature home
The theme this year is ‘bringing nature home and biodiversity’, and there’s loads of ways we can all join in.
Our little patches of garden are a miniature biodiverse universe in itself, playing host to thousands of species, most of which you’ll never know are there! They are vital habitats for life and it’s those lives that we are helping by cultivating and protecting the space outside our back doors.
“Biodiversity has never been more important and as the leading gardening charity we want to have a positive influence on the world around us. This year we want to share our expertise, helping everyone understand how they can encourage and nurture wildlife and nature, and create healthy and resilient environments in their own gardens. Our campaign, ‘Bringing Nature Home’ will encourage everyone from policy makers to builders, courtyard gardeners and school children to bring as much nature and diversity into their space as possible.” RHS
How will we celebrate National Gardening Week and bring nature home?
There is a great list of things to do on the National Gardening Week website. We love this year’s theme where people can build log piles, bee hotels, a bug house or even let a corner go a bit wild to boost biodiversity and help pollinate all the flowers we’re growing.
But rather than any of the bigger projects like digging a new pond, our Ash Lodge residents and respite guests will be focusing on planting beautiful bright flowers in containers and putting our favourite veggies in the ground. Look at the bounty we harvested last year! Nothing tastes better than something you’ve grown yourself and we think this suits the theme of bringing nature home, perfectly.
Will you join in too?
We’d love to encourage everyone to do a little bit for National Gardening Week, so even if you only have a windowsill, how about sowing some herb seeds to add some extra flavour to your salads, or growing some pretty flowers in a pot on the doorstep?
And if you don’t have a garden of your own, you can still help nature in your local spaces by carefully picking up litter and safely disposing of it.
Whether you plan to plant a tree, hold off mowing the lawn until the end of ‘No Mow May’ or help clean up the public green spaces, we wish you a happy National Gardening Week, and hope you get lots out of it.
