HavensWood.uk

20/05/2026

Bed and Breakfast near Market Drayton. Book direct for best prices guaranteed online. For great accommodation in Shropshire choose Ternhill Farm House

19/05/2026

Would any of my friends like a free weekend away in Ternhill Farmhouse, Ternhill Farm House, Market Drayton TF9 3PX Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd. 5* breakfast included.

https://www.ternhillfarm.co.uk/

Also available is 4 places on a full days Weaving Craft workshop nearby

Please message me

Bed and Breakfast near Market Drayton. Book direct for best prices guaranteed online. For great accommodation in Shropshire choose Ternhill Farm House

10/05/2026

Made some of this last week with a group, we wrapped ours around a hot dog 🤗👍🔥

10/04/2026

Butterflies that overwintered in your yard are already flying.

Mourning cloaks survived the entire winter as adults — tucked under loose bark, inside woodpiles, beneath leaf litter. They emerge on the first warm April days looking tattered and faded. Most people assume they're dying. They're not. They're among the hardiest butterflies on the continent, and they're hungry.

Spring butterflies need two things April gardens rarely provide — early nectar and undisturbed shelter for chrysalises that haven't opened yet.

🦋 What to protect:

- Chrysalises attached to structures — swallowtail pupae look like small brown or green pointed capsules stuck to walls, fences, and plant stems. They've been there since fall. Scraping them off during spring cleaning removes adults that were days from emerging

- Leaf litter along garden edges — comma butterflies, question marks, and several hairstreak species overwinter in dead leaves as adults or pupae. Hold off raking borders until May. What looks like neglect is sheltering the first generation of the season

🌿 What to provide:

- Early nectar before the garden fills in — dandelions, opening lilac buds, flowering fruit trees. These carry overwintering adults and migratory species through the gap before summer flowers bloom

- Host plants, not just nectar flowers — milkweed for monarchs arriving late April, parsley and dill for swallowtail caterpillars, violets for fritillaries. Nectar brings adults through your garden. Host plants make them stay and lay eggs. That's the difference between a garden butterflies visit and one they inhabit

- A shallow dish of damp sand in a sunny spot — butterflies extract minerals from wet soil and sand. A pinch of sea salt in the dish draws species you may not have seen in your garden before

- Skip broad-spectrum caterpillar sprays through spring — products that target caterpillars don't distinguish between pests and the species you planted the garden to attract

The butterflies already here survived six months of winter to reach this week. What happens next depends on what they find. 🌱

07/04/2026

04/04/2026

It is never seen, makes no sound, and yet it decides whether your soil is alive or dead. The earthworm is the only garden animal that transforms the soil itself — not just what grows in it.

Every night, hundreds of earthworms work beneath your feet. They burrow, digest, mix, and restructure the soil at depths no garden tool reaches. A soil without worms compacts, drains poorly, and suffocates roots. A soil with an active worm population regenerates itself, season after season.

What an earthworm does for your garden:

It burrows to depths of up to two metres, creating channels that carry rainwater directly to roots — reducing surface runoff and drought stress simultaneously.

It ingests and transforms organic matter at up to 30 times its own body weight per year into humus of exceptional quality — finely structured, biologically active, and available to plant roots.

Its castings (worm casts) contain five times more nitrogen and seven times more phosphorus than the surrounding soil — produced continuously, concentrated precisely where roots are active.

It mixes soil layers, drawing deep minerals upward toward the surface zone where plants feed.

It aerates the soil without inverting it. Its tunnels replace mechanical digging — and unlike digging, they do not destroy the fungal networks, larvae, and micro-organisms that make the system function.

It reproduces rapidly in mulched, undisturbed soil. A population can double within three months under good conditions.

It disappears within a few seasons from soil treated with chemical pesticides or turned annually with a rotavator.

The gardener who looks after the earthworms in their soil never needs to feed the soil itself. 🪱🌿

04/04/2026

We're thinking of having a free den building weekend 😊 come along and utilise our 37acres, bring tools, rope, tarps - you can even camp out with your own fire pit if you wanted, or stay till the evening and join us back for breakfast around the camp fire. Please message or email us with dates and we can get a plan together 👍🌳🌲🔥