Quick Start Guide

Nature recovery is a community effort, which means that everyone has a role to play in making it a reality. A key element in creating a local collective movement is to involve as many people as possible. Young and old, all can play a part. In particular, children are the future, they are very aware of the dangers facing our planet and understand the need to take action. Their enthusiasm is catching and can ignite the imaginations of others.

We aim to share ideas and success stories. If something works for one of us, if could work for others. We can help each other in our common cause.

It Begins at Home

Assess your Garden for Nature Friendliness

Is your garden nature friendly? This short and simple review measures four essential features to help assess how welcoming to wildlife your garden is: food, shelter, water and working together, and also measures whether your garden provides any natural solutions to some of the climate and nature issues we are facing. It takes just a few minutes and you'll get a nature friendly score and you will get ideas for how you can make it even more welcoming. However welcoming your g

Set up a Basic Community Group

This guide explains how to set up a basic community group or unincorporated association. It covers meetings, constitutions, money and rules. The easiest group to set up is called an “unincorporated association”. You need to write a “constitution” or “governing document”. This is a list of rules for the group. It also says what your group’s going to do, and how it’s going to do it. This kind of group: isn’t a charity (although you can set up a charity if you want to. Make sure

Contact your local Council

South Norfolk Council has endorsed the concept of community based action to address nature recovery. In December 2023, they passed a motion to Encourage communities to identify opportunities for nature recovery and support them to take action through implementing the Harleston community model throughout the District. The motion: https://218529cd-10ba-46b5-9169-7bbec713c1c0.usrfiles.com/ugd/218529_743bfdd4a7834cc78702751515d6d09b.pdf This can be used as the basis for a similar

Some Simple Ideas

Feed Birds in your Garden

Find out how to attract birds into your garden all year round. Attracting birds to your garden is easy: supplement naturally available food with bird food, and watch them flock in! Remember to keep feeders and tables clean, so the birds stay healthy and disease-free, and position your feeders in a relatively open area away from predators - the birds will feel safer and visit more! Make sure food is available at all times as birds have different needs throughout the year, such

Make your own Compost

We discard lots food waste every year. This ends up in landfill, where it takes many years to completely degrade and, while they do break down, they emit methane into the atmosphere. We should look to our food consumption to reduce waste. Freeze your leftovers for another day. Plan meals and write a shopping list, only buy what is needed. Then compost unavoidable food waste like vegetable cuttings. The benefits of composting your garden and kitchen waste are two-fold. You’

Make a Log Shelter

Log piles are perfect hiding places for insects, providing a convenient buffet for frog, birds, and hedgehogs too! Putting together a log pile will create a village for all things creepy and crawly. In turn, this busy community will attract birds, hedgehogs and frogs looking to snack on a tasty morsel. Perhaps the most spectacular garden deadwood denizen is the 50 mm-long stag beetle, which is found in light soils south of a line from the Wash to Bristol. Stag beetle larva st

Grow a Wild Patch or Mini Meadow

Whether it's a flowerpot, flowerbed, wild patch in your lawn, or entire meadow, planting wildflowers provides vital resources to support a wide range of insects that couldn't survive in urban areas otherwise. It is also a great way of avoiding tools such as lawnmowers that are powered by fossil fuels! Option 1 - Let your grass grow long Long grass, peppered with flowers, is one of the rarest habitats in our well-tended gardens, yet it is incredibly beneficial for wildlife. Pa

Plant for Pollinators

Set up a ‘nectar café’ by planting flowers for pollinating insects like bees and butterflies. Many of our prettiest insects feed on nectar, so need flowering plants for their survival. Butterflies, moths, bees and hoverflies all need sources of nectar and pollen to thrive. As they travel from flower to flower, they also pollinate them, enabling them to set seed or bear fruit. So, setting up a nectar café benefits both your plants and you, allowing you to enjoy the flitting an

Companion Planting

Grow plants that help each other! Maximise your garden for you and for wildlife using this planting technique. Companion planting is all about creating areas of plants that provide benefits to each other. In practice, this means that plants that complement each other are placed together, and those that don’t, are kept apart. By planting 'companion' plants among other plants it can help them to grow by either attracting beneficial insects, and repelling others, or by acting as

Be Environmemtally Aware

Use Less Plastics

Plastic waste and its damaging effect on our seas and natural world has been big news recently. Here's what you can you do about it. Plastic is choking our seas and natural world. It poses a huge threat to wildlife because it doesn’t just disappear; it simply breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. Aside from the dangers of becoming trapped or injured, animals often ingest plastic fragments, with the potential to build up in the bodies of animals right up the food chain

Reduce Food Waste

If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, surpassed only by the USA and China. Reducing how much food you throw away will save you money and encourage you to eat healthier. Each year in homes across the UK, we throw away 6.6 million tonnes of household food each year, almost three quarters of which could have been eaten. Food waste generates about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So anything you can do to limit what you chu

Recycle and Reuse

Recycle, upcycle - and make do and mend! Production of household waste needs to decrease by 33% by 2037 to reach recommended emissions targets. So get out that needle and thread! Mend Clothing - The fashion industry accounts for about 10% of global carbon emissions so anything you can do to reduce the number of clothes you buy is vital. Sewing on a button, mending a hole or refashioning a garment completely are great ways to make items last a lot longer. Look out for local re