Protect your patch!

Written By Melissa Harrison

Encounter’s founder Melissa Harrison explains how small acts of custodianship can connect us to nature, boost our stores of optimism, and empower us feel good about the world

Many of us (myself included) swing between feelings of great joy and pleasure when we experience the natural world around us, and a deep sense of worry when we think of everything it’s up against. And that worry can easily turn into paralysis, or even a feeling that it’s easier just to turn away. When we do that, though, it’s not just nature that loses out on our care for it: we lose out too. Connecting to nature is an easy and proven route to better wellbeing, which is why the Encounter app exists.

Fortunately, there’s a practical way to manage those feelings and keep everything in balance. It will bring you extra helpings of connection and joy when you want them, it’ll help you whenever you feel helpless, and best of all, it will benefit the natural world around you, too. And it’s really, really simple: just protect your home patch.

What’s a home patch?

A home patch can be anything you want it to be: your street, a square of waste ground, a corner of a local park that you walk through often. Make it somewhere you’re in regular contact with, not somewhere you have to drive or get public transport to: you want this to be a close relationship, not a long-distance thing.

If you’ve got a garden, it’s tempting to call that your home patch and leave it at that – and while we should all be looking after the nature that lives in our gardens, I’d encourage you, if you can, to include a little bit extra, too. Caring for somewhere that might otherwise have nobody is where the good feelings come in.

Decide where your home patch starts and ends, so that it doesn’t extend to infinity. And don’t worry, you don’t need to tell anyone. This new territory can exist in your head.

Now what?

The first thing to do is get to know it a bit better. Attention is a super-power: it sharpens the more you use it, so the more you look, listen and feel the more you’ll see, hear and experience. Spend some time looking, listening and finding out more about what you discover. Use Encounter to keep notes of the things that live there. Can you identify some of the plants, and work out which birds sing? If you see any butterflies or moths, what is the food plant their caterpillars need? Are there any mining bees? How much sun does it get, and what’s the soil like? Are there any nests or burrows? You could even set up a trailcam if you have permission to see who goes where – including at night.

Now let’s think about how you can quietly help your home patch. This isn’t about heroics, and it goes without saying that if your patch is a shared public space you should always be respectful of whatever caretaking processes are already in place there. But just because it’s the council’s job to litter-pick, for example, doesn’t mean that you can’t, too. After all, your home patch is your little kingdom. Why wouldn’t you pick up a coke can when you walk past?

Picking up litter is one of the simplest things you can do for your home patch, and it also illustrates why we need to have a boundary around it: you’re not cleaning up your whole postcode, just the bit you’ve taken under your care. This boundary is really vital when it comes to not getting overwhelmed by worry, so make sure you’re firm about it. You’re doing a brilliant thing by taking care of your home patch, and unless you happen to have a day with extra stores of energy, that is absolutely enough.

There are lots more things you can do besides tidying. Keep an eye on the weather: if it hasn’t rained in a while, how about watering any flowering plants, so they can produce nectar for bees and butterflies? Look out for young or newly planted street trees too, which can struggle if the ground around them is covered in tarmac or paving and doesn’t let rain through. You could also leave a dish of clean water out for birds and small mammals and keep it topped up; small things like these could be what helps your local plants and animals make it through the next drought.

In taking your home patch gently under your wing you’ll be looking after one little bit of your nearby wild,
not all of it: and that is enough.

You might discover that there are some problem plants in your home patch. By that I don’t mean plants that are non-native, or plants you happen not to like; and I definitely don’t mean weeds. What I do mean are plants that might be in the wrong place and out-competing others, reducing biodiversity or causing other problems. Himalayan balsam can run wild on river banks, causing erosion when it dies back; alexanders can grow so thickly that they shade out any other wildflowers. These are both plants that I have near me; I don’t go around spraying things with weedkiller (obviously!) but I do try to prevent them from flowering and setting further seed. Just make sure you’ve researched the plants in your patch carefully and sought permission for your intervention, if necessary: don’t go windmilling in with your secateurs.

What about bird and bat boxes – could you put some up in your home patch, or find out who to contact to do it? People don’t always realise that birds like swifts are in steep decline, partly because our modern buildings don’t leave them anywhere to nest. But if you suggest it to builders and friendly neighbours they’re often more than happy to put a box or nest cup up, or protect an existing nest site that you’ve identified. You might not be able to singlehandedly stop the decline in swifts but you can make sure they have homes near you, and if enough of us do the same, that’ll make a huge difference.

Can you be a bug buddy, maybe? Work out which of the wild plants on your patch are the food plants for caterpillars, then keep an eye out, and if you know there’s going to be strimming, take some caterpillars home and raise them yourself (it’s easier than you think!) If you know there are stag beetles on your home patch, you could add some logs to decay, or help make sure dead wood isn’t tidied away. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do everything. Just pick a couple of things you can manage and see how you go.

A really brilliant thing to do would be to send in species records from your home patch, perhaps weekly, or just whenever you can. You can use iNaturalist to do this (it’s free and will even help with identification). Or you might want to record seasonal occurrences and add them to Nature’s Calendar, a long-running project to track the effects of weather and climate change on the natural world. In good weather, you could do a regular FIT count (flower-insect timed count) to monitor pollinators – whatever takes your fancy. Keep an eye on Encounter for other citizen science projects you can join in with.

The final thing you can do to protect your patch will come naturally. Once you’ve been caring for it for a while you’ll find you want to use your voice to protect it – which is where advocacy comes in. To alter mowing patterns or improve planting for pollinators you might find yourself joining your local park’s ‘Friends of’ volunteer scheme, or if the street trees you love are threatened with the chop, you could start a petition or write to your local MP. Perhaps you’ll get together with some neighbours to help hedgehogs, crowd-fund for an ecological survey, or campaign to ensure that a new housing development is fitted with swift bricks.

But that’s all in the future. For now, the key is this: in taking your home patch gently under your wing you’ll be looking after one little bit of your nearby wild, not all of it: and that is enough. And in this quiet and boundaried act of caring, you’ll find yourself transformed, too: no longer helpless but useful, no longer angry but empowered, no longer separate but deeply connected, because the most powerful relationship with nature is a reciprocal one: the more we do for it, the more it gives us in return. With each small act you’ll be changing a little patch of the world – and your own life, too.

Litter photo by DaYsO, ladybird photo by Benjamin Balázs, nest photo by Fabrizio Frigeni, all on Unsplash

Melissa Harrison
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