Tag Archive for: wellbeing

Join Perennial in creating a culture of mental wellbeing

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Join Perennial in creating a culture of mental wellbeing: Since last year, over 55 individuals from 33 companies have successfully qualified as Mental Health First Aiders as part of Perennial’s pilot programme, offering an invaluable first point of contact for those in their workplace that may be struggling.

Trained to have an understanding of mental health and the factors that can affect wellbeing, as well as the practical skills to spot the signs and symptoms, these MHFAiders® are there to step in, reassure and support their colleagues.

Join Perennial in creating a culture of mental wellbeing

Join Perennial in creating a culture of mental wellbeing

However, according to Clare Downs, Head of Preventative Services there is still the opportunity for more employers to step forward and join Perennial in tackling the issues and widening the conversation around mental health.

“We are absolutely delighted that so many different horticultural employees, from grounds maintenance to managers to HR personnel, have become trained MHFAiders® and champions of the importance of health and wellbeing within the workplace and beyond. But we also know from our research and experience that mental health issues remain one of the biggest contributors to ill health within the industry.+ We welcome organisations to join us in continuing to raise awareness, support more staff to be trained and influence the wider horticulture community to help create a culture of positive mental wellbeing for all.”

As one recently trained MHFAider® says, “We are at work a lot of hours each week and probably spend more time with our colleagues than our family and friends. I want all my colleagues to feel they have a safe and open environment to speak to a person, who can listen and not judge – and hopefully help them understand and find the support they need.  Since doing the course, I think it should be mandatory along with physical first aiders within a business.”

If you are an employer with over 30 employees who proactively wants to increase their team’s mental health and wellbeing, please contact Helen Waddington to find out more about this pilot programme at hwaddington@perennial.org.uk.

Free limited places are now available for training courses being held during May, July, October and November 2023.

Perennial’s pilot programme is delivered in partnership with Mental Health First Aid England.

+ Perennial’s Health & Wellbeing Survey (2021) found that mental wellbeing was among the biggest perceived challenges for people working in horticulture.

  • 85% of people’s mental wellbeing was poor or below average
  • 26% of people listed depression, anxiety, and stress as critical issues
  • 22% said they did not recognise when they were unable to cope or how to deal with these circumstance

For the full findings visit perennial.org.uk/survey

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Boost your wellbeing

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Boost your wellbeing: Ahead of Mental Health Awareness Week (9 – 15 May), wildflower specialist Seedball is looking at how nature and wildlife can improve mental health and wellbeing.

It has long been considered the case that gardening and tending to plants are effective ways to relieve stress and improve wellbeing, and this connection is increasingly being recognised by science. In fact, Sky News reported people who garden daily have wellbeing scores 6.6% higher and stress levels 4.2% lower than those who do not garden at all. Quite simply, a connection to nature has proven benefits for mental health, and this can be enjoyed even without a garden – the simple act of growing something from seed can increase this feeling of connecting with the natural world.

Boost your wellbeing

Boost your wellbeing

Seedball makes it easy to grow wildflowers from seed, no matter how much space is available, or how much experience a person has of gardening. The company believes that the benefits of growing should be available to everyone, so has developed a range of products to make it accessible to all.

Each seed ball acts as a mini ecosystem so the seeds can germinate and grow with very little help. Every ball has between 30 to 100 seeds depending on the variety, and contains clay to protect it from birds, ants and other predators. Peat-free compost is also added to provide nutrition and a small amount of chilli powder is used to deter slugs and snails from eating the young shoots.  There are a wide variety of seedballs available, and they can all be thrown onto soil or compost in a garden bed, pot or planter during the Spring or Autumn.

Here are some of the ways the easy ways Seedball can help you encourage wildflowers, wildlife and nature into your life:

Wildflower Tins

RRP: £6.00

Seedball has a variety of compact tins , which are bursting full of 20 balls ready to be grown, the perfect amount for a small flower bed. They are also a great choice for those living in urban environments, with limited outdoor space as the seeds can be sprinkled into three – five medium sized pots to create a wildlife haven on a balcony or terrace. Each seed ball contains approximately 30 seeds with a variety of wildflowers included.  Wildflower tins have multiple varieties including the Bee Mix, Urban Meadow and Butterfly Mix, all that wildlife will just love!

RRP: £8.00 – £12.00

For those looking to create a wider patch of wildflowers, Seedball has a variety of  Grab Bags.  For generously sized gardens and outdoor spaces, the larger Grab Bags, each containing 100 seed balls are perfect, making it easy for anyone to create a larger wildflower patch or multiple smaller areas within an area. These bags are available in different varieties, such as the Bee Mix, Foragers Mix and Annuals Mix, each including a variety of wildflowers, which make growing a beautiful field of colour simple and uncomplicated.

For further flexibility, Seedball also has a range of Single Flower Grab Bags, each containing 50 seed balls of a single flower, allowing people to design their garden, balcony, patio or terrace, whether it be a plant pot bursting with blissful bluebells, or a garden bed filled with the hugely popular poppies. With over 20 varieties to choose from, there is something for everyone, with wildflowers including buttercups, red clover, chamomile and yarrow.

Meadow Pots

RRP: £20.00

The Mini Meadow pots are the all in one gift set for anyone who loves gardening or new plant growers as they provide a simple and easy way to create a wildlife haven. Everything needed comes supplied in the 100% recyclable box, including the 12 seed wildflower balls, along with a set of three biodegradable and compostable bamboo pots and saucers and peat-free coir discs. All you need to do is add water, and you are ready to watch the flowers grow! The pots are best positioned outdoors, on a windowsill, and can be set up at any time of the year. There are three varieties available, the Bee Mix, Butterfly Mix and Garden Meadow, all with a different combination of seeds.

Find out more about how Seedball is helping encourage wellness and wellbeing at https://seedball.co.uk/about/.

You can also find Seedball on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

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Wellbeing and wilderness

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Wellbeing and wilderness: It may have been the 15th British Open hosted at prestigious Royal St George’s in Sandwich, Kent, but for the greenkeeping team headed up by course manager Paul Larsen, the 149th Open was an extraordinary and unique event.

Set in the dunes of the Kentish coastline and bisected with swathes of naturalistic grasses and wildflowers, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in a nature reserve, not one of the most famous and prestigious golf courses in the world. Yet for Paul, showcasing the natural beauty of the area was a top priority.

Wellbeing and wilderness

Wellbeing and wilderness

Paul comments: “We have amazing views and a unique position as a golf course within a dune land. We made a conscious decision some years ago to move away from the typical golf course with its striped lines and focus on enhancing what makes us special. We brought it back to what it used to be – more wild and natural – and having The Open here has been an opportunity to show people what we’ve been doing.

“When you’re preparing for an event of this magnitude, for us it’s not about modifying the course, adding new holes or making changes to greens and bunkers. It’s about doing what we always do but more regularly and without room for mistakes. We take such pride in our work and were excited to showcase our product.”

Supporting Paul was his resident 16-strong greenkeeping team boosted by the help of two support teams totalling a further 34 greenkeeping specialists from other golf courses both locally and around the UK. Work started at 4am each day and the teams were responsible for hand-cutting the greens, cutting the fairways, tees and aprons and raking the bunkers, all on a daily basis.

In order to sustain such a large greenkeeping resource, Reesink Turfcare, the sole Toro distributor in the UK for golf and sports fields equipment and irrigation products, produced a loan fleet from Toro, global leaders in turfcare machinery to bolster the Toro Reelmaster fairway mowers, Groundsmaster rough mowers, Greensmaster TriFlex Hybrid riding greensmowers and Greensmaster Flex walk-behind greensmowers machines already on site.

As a Toro Total Solutions customer, the machines complement the Toro Lynx Central Control System and over a thousand sprinklers across the greens, tees and fairways.

For Paul, having the support from Reesink and Toro is something he is “so grateful for”. Paul elaborates: “There’s no blueprint for hosting The Open in a pandemic. It’s a unique experience so having the support of the extra fleet from Toro made our job easier, enabling us to double our capacity and help everyone to perform at the top of their ability.”

When asked about dealing with the pressures of hosting a major sporting event in the midst of a pandemic Paul is characteristically pragmatic about it: “There’s no doubt that the pandemic gave us some logistical challenges such as getting staff tested and managing teams to avoid social contact.

“The adrenaline does flow but there’s no secret to getting it right. We just focused on our work. We’d put all the right preparations in place so at the end of the day my view was ‘you’ve got what you’ve got’.

“The nature of our work is always reactive, and we adapted constantly whether it was to the weather or changes in regulations. We were resilient and worked incredibly hard. The players and spectators loved the course and we’ve had feedback from members of the sporting press saying it was one of the best Opens they’d seen.”

Having welcomed up to 32,000 visitors per day, the course is currently awaiting a full assessment from Paul and his team. Paul elaborates: “At the end of August when The Open is fully off site we will be able to assess the course and the extent of the damage from footfall. I expect there’ll be some areas that require reseeding or new turf. We may have to burn some areas of the rough to regenerate it but essentially it’ll be routine maintenance.”

In Paul’s ten years working at Royal St George’s, the 2021 British Open was one of the highlights of his career, particularly making such a major success of the event in a pandemic.

Paul concludes: “The biggest achievement? It was definitely keeping everyone safe. It was a pleasure to welcome spectators back to the sport safely and hear the excitement from the crowd. You could feel the energy and it was a fitting end to all our hard work.”

To talk to someone about how the Toro range would suit your course, call Reesink Turfcare on 01480 226800.

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Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

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Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing: Mental Health Awareness Week, organised by the Mental Health Foundation, runs each year from the 10th to 16th of May. This year’s theme of ‘Nature’ is particularly poignant with lockdown restrictions easing and people once again allowed to socialise at both indoor and outdoor locations.

The emotional wellbeing benefits of nature have been researched extensively over the years and, as Paul Bean from grounds maintenance specialist Nurture Landscapes Group explains, it is important to keep these in mind all-year-round, especially as the world looks to recover from Covid-19.

Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

Maintaining outside space for emotional wellbeing

Research[1] commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation and the UK World Wildlife Fund (WWF-UK) published ahead of Mental Health Awareness Week found that 62% of people felt that taking a walk helped improve their mental wellbeing during the pandemic.

Now that we are starting to look ahead to the post-Covid world, outside spaces will continue to be areas of comfort. That, of course, means caring for these areas so that they can provide the respite people are looking for.

‘Caring’, in this context, includes small individual actions that each person can take in their day-to-day lives, such as taking litter home, to carrying out more extensive grounds maintenance and improving sustainability practices, such as using energy-efficient equipment when tending to a park’s upkeep.

There is also a lot to be said for creating a space that the local community feel proud to have on their doorstep, achieved by hosting events around biodiversity and environmental awareness.

Urbanised areas in particular can see the benefits of opening up more natural spaces in these ways, especially as the various lockdown measures highlighted the need for improved access. According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, only 13% of residents across urban areas in England and the three most populous cities in Wales lived within a ten minute walk of a local park, and of those who did have good access, nearly a quarter (24%) suggested the park was at risk of becoming too overcrowded.[2] Yet before the first lockdown in March 2020, 93% of respondents had visited a green space in the year leading up to movement restrictions being implemented.

Improving natural areas to create a quiet haven in an otherwise stressful and at times, overwhelming setting, doesn’t happen overnight. However, choosing the right plants, flowers, and even the positioning of benches, are good first steps. Then, of course, there is the ongoing TLC which keeps the park looking at its best.

The message of taking care of the natural environment for our own emotional wellbeing is a key one for Mental Health Awareness Week this year, and something we at Nurture Landscapes take great pride in being able to facilitate. While we may not be experts in mental health, we do understand and appreciate how important it is for people to have a space where they can take some time to care for themselves.

And the signs that this will continue to be the case are there already, with offices looking to utilise outdoor meeting areas, such as the one we use ourselves at our head office in Surrey (pictured), and nature charities reporting greater interest in their respective activities, according to ONS data.[3]

The same data reveals that during the summer of 2020, the use of #m_2362510770876043122__ftn3outdoor spaces surged when compared to Natural England’s baseline figures from the period 2010 to 2018, peaking at a 100% increase in August of last year. Good weather and the temporary lifting of restrictions will certainly have been key factors for this dramatic increase, but the understanding and awareness of nature that people developed in the months spent in lockdown will have also contributed.

Before the virus outbreak, when long commutes and crowded urban areas were considered ‘the norm’, going for a walk to clear the mind or get some fresh air out of a busy office provided a welcome respite from the constant pressures of modern living. Covid-19 showed us just how important those five minutes out in the fresh air truly are.

As Mental Health Foundation’s Thriving in Nature report states, “nature is for everyone [and] it is essential that everyone can access nature whatever their circumstances”.[4] To fulfil this vision, and ensure that the post-pandemic era has a strong focus on taking care of our own individual mental health needs, opening up natural spaces and maintaining them to create green oases in what can be an overwhelming world needs to be a priority, especially with nearly half of people in the UK noticing the increasing benefits of nature on their overall mental wellbeing.

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