A Few Words About Us
Greencroft Gardening is owned and run by Mandy Corser and we specialise in offering gardening services South West of Stafford and the Shropshire border.
Mandy has over 40 years domestic gardening experience, is a former Estates Gardener and Garden volunteer. Mandy is also RHS and WRAGS qualified and is passionate about gardening for the environment, biodiversity and sustainability.
Greencroft Gardening is a member of The Gardeners’ Guild, which is a national trade network for professionally qualified gardeners and WFGA, which is a charity promoting training in horticultural careers.
We are covered by Public Liability Insurance and Professional Indemnity Insurance for your peace of mind.
The Gardeners Guild (TGG) is a national trade network for qualified gardeners. Established in 2006, TGG maintains a register of certified gardeners who offer garden and grounds maintenance as part of their services. TGG provides you with greater assurance when selecting a gardener. TGG members must hold at least one government endorsed horticultural qualification and are required to abide by the terms of membership. As a client of Greencroft Gardening you can be confident that you have chosen a TGG member who has been officially trained and formally assessed to meet high horticultural standards.
Gardening For Wildlife
Wildlife is under intense pressure as habitats are destroyed and built over. The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world.
UK gardens occupy about 433,000 hectares (a bit more than a fifth the size of Wales) and so are ideally placed to help wildlife.
In England alone, garden area is more than four and a half times larger than that of our National Nature Reserves.
This is a colossal resource of national significance for the thousands of wildlife species that can live in gardens and means that there’s a lot we can do as gardeners to help wildlife.
This could be with plants suitable for pollinators such as bees, putting up bird boxes for blue tits, which will eat the aphids on your plants.
A hedgehog can travel 1-2km every night in search of food, so make sure you have a hedgehog gateway in your fence, so that hedgehogs can visit many gardens.
Making sure your garden has ‘layered planting’ will help create habitats for wildlife and will be visually pleasing. Think about incorporating ground cover, bulbs, perennials, shrubs, climbers and trees. This style of planting will help wildlife to feel safe as it moves around your garden.
Here’s some other ideas to help wildlife in your garden:
- Have an area in the garden specifically for wildlife friendly plants
- Use plants with ‘single’ flowers rather than ‘double’ flowers, to provide nectar and pollen for insects
- Install hedgehog boxes so that hedgehogs have somewhere to live in summer and hibernate in winter
- Keep some old dead wood in a pile - this will encourage beetles, which will eat slugs
- Bee and lacewing hotels - these give bees and lacewings somewhere to live and breed - lacewing larvae will eat the aphids on your plants
- Don’t be too tidy – leave the seed heads on plants for the birds to eat over winter
- Install a pond – no matter how small the pond is, it will encourage wildlife into your garden, that could be dragonflies, frogs or newts. Birds and bees might like to stop by for a drink as well
- Get together with neighbours to create a community wildlife area
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