Brownbread Horse Rescue

28/05/2026

🦡 Check your netting - save wildlife 🦊🥅

Both Badger Trust and The Fox Project are seeing an increase in badgers and foxes being rescued from netting.

Netting, like that used in goal posts or garden projects, left out or unsecured, is a growing danger for wildlife. In 2024, the RSPCA received 1,355 reports of wildlife caught in netting, with peak season (May–July) starting now.
Animals caught in the netting experience extreme stress and can suffer life threatening injuries from trying to free themselves.

✅ What to do
• Tie up sports netting when not in use
• Pack away garden netting safely
• Encourage others (neighbours, schools, councils) to do the same

⚠️ If you spot an animal trapped
• Keep your distance
• Call a local rescue or badger group

👉 Find help:
https://buff.ly/UxdnGR0
https://buff.ly/4dCd8C1

Read Badger Trust's article on the dangers of netting on wildlife: https://buff.ly/vinpnkm

Simple actions can prevent serious suffering — please share.

📷 Northamptonshire Badger Group & The Fox Project

28/05/2026

Please don’t buy these houses, the hedgehogs can get their spines stuck inside and then they get trapped.
Thank you David for removing them from sale at Hollingworth Lake RSPCA shop 🦔🦔

27/05/2026

Looking for a half term activity that gets you outdoors and helps protect wildlife too? 😎

Carry out a wildlife safety check in your garden or local area, spot potential hazards, and take action to help keep animals safe.

Grab your activity sheet and everything you need to know here this National Children's Gardening Week: https://bit.ly/4v2ggSY

26/05/2026

One frog. Several hundred insects per night. Worth fifteen minutes of your time. 🐸
Common frogs and common toads are among the most effective pest controllers in a British garden. A single toad can consume an impressive number of slugs, beetles, and insects across a season. They need two things: a pond or damp area to breed in spring, and a cool, sheltered refuge for the rest of the year. The frog hotel provides the second.
How to build one:
Fill a terracotta pot with five or six short lengths of drainpipe or PVC tube — 50–75 mm diameter, 15–20 cm long — standing upright and packed tightly together so they cannot shift. Add a shallow layer of water at the base, a handful of small stones for support and grip, and a few shade plants around the outside to keep the interior cool and damp.
Position the pot in a shaded, north or east-facing spot in the garden — under a shrub, against a wall, or in a cool border. Frogs and toads will locate it naturally and use the tubes as daytime shelters during the warmer months.
In winter, a log pile, leaf heap, or an upturned pot with a gap at the base serves as a hibernation site. Toads in particular overwinter in the soil and under debris.
The garden that provides shelter for frogs and toads needs significantly less intervention against slugs and vine weevils — both of which are on the nightly menu. 🌿

26/05/2026

Elder is one of the most frequently removed shrubs in the British garden — accused of growing too fast, smelling unpleasant when the leaves are crushed, and routinely cut to the ground during the spring tidy-up. It is a significant ecological mistake. 🌿

Sambucus nigra is one of the most generously wildlife-supporting shrubs in the British Isles. It flowers from late May to July — flat-topped corymbs of hundreds of small cream-white flowers with a distinctive sweet scent — providing exceptional quantities of pollen at the transition between the end of spring nectar flow and the beginning of summer. Honeybees, solitary bees, bumblebees, and hoverflies all visit. The elder moth (Ourapteryx sambucaria) feeds exclusively on this shrub — its caterpillars eat nothing else.

The purple-black berry clusters ripen from August to October, precisely when summer migrants are building reserves for departure and winter visitors are beginning to arrive. Blackbirds, song thrushes, blackcap, starlings, and waxwings all take the berries. Hedgehogs feed on fallen fruit at the base. The hollow stems, once the pith has been removed, are used as natural nesting tubes by red mason bees and leafcutter bees — elder is, in fact, the original material for insect hotels before commercial bamboo tubes became standard.

For people: the flowers in cordial, fritters, and elderflower champagne; the berries in jelly, chutney, and elderberry cordial. The berries must be cooked — raw they cause nausea. Traditional British cottage gardens kept an elder at the boundary for exactly these reasons.

If an elder has genuinely grown too large, cut it hard — it will regenerate vigorously and be back in flower the following year. Removing one from a garden where it has space is a different matter entirely. 🐦

24/05/2026

22/05/2026

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21/05/2026

Most people don't know that released balloons travel miles before breaking apart — and the fragments land where wildlife finds them.

Latex looks like jellyfish to sea turtles. Ribbon tangles around nesting birds. Mylar never breaks down.

The intention behind a balloon release is real. The alternatives carry the same meaning without the landing.

🌿 Five ways to mark the moment:

- Blow bubbles — they catch the same light and vanish without a trace
- Plant a native tree or wildflower patch in their name
- Float luminaries on water — visible, beautiful, temporary
- Write messages on plantable seed paper — bury it, wildflowers grow
- Donate to a wildlife rehabilitation center in their name

The gesture doesn't have to cost a life to mean something 🌿

21/05/2026

May is one of the best months to take lavender cuttings — the new growth is soft and roots readily, and by autumn you will have established plants ready to go in the ground. 🌿

The method:

Select a healthy non-flowering stem from this year's new growth — soft, silver-green, and flexible. Cut 8-10 cm just below a leaf node.

Strip the lower leaves, leaving two or three pairs at the tip. Dip the cut end in hormone rooting powder.

Insert into a small pot of free-draining compost — equal parts peat-free compost and horticultural grit or perlite works well. Place several cuttings around the edge of one pot.

Cover with a clear polythene bag or a propagator lid to hold humidity. Place in a bright spot out of direct sun.

Roots form in four to six weeks. Once the cutting resists a gentle tug, it has rooted. Pot on individually and grow on in a sheltered spot until autumn planting.

One established lavender plant can yield ten or more cuttings each May. A full border from a single parent plant is entirely achievable over two seasons. 🌸

21/05/2026

Please share🦔🦔🦔