As the summer rolls on into (a slightly rainy) August it has been a busy couple of months for me, with various different projects really starting to kick off. My personal project, the herb garden at Devlin Court Sheltered Housing is almost complete and we are looking into doing a repeat of the project at another local sheltered housing complex. Another exciting ‘Ageing Well’ project saw the residents of Fairview nursing home in Bannockburn outside in the sun on Wednesday making mini gardens for their windowsills.
The workshop was part of a series of activities that Victoria Syme, a local occupational therapist and I have been running with the group. Our aim is to create a selection of activities that can be used to engage people with a diagnosis of dementia living in care homes with nature and being outdoors. We have been trying to do as many of the activities as possible out of doors and we were lucky on Wednesday to have a beautiful sunny day to enjoy in as we plated and painted our ‘mini-gardens’.
The residents that took part all seemed to enjoy the activity and I even heard some heartening comments such as “It’s nice to get out of the house into the fresh air. I sleep better at night when I have had some fresh air” and “wonderful. Just wonderful”. See below for instructions to make a ‘mini-garden’.
Planting sunflowers
Painting
The finished ‘Mini-Garden’ and a cup of tea
The finished gardens on a sunny windowsill
How to make a mini garden
- First take a used plastic bottle (1.5 – 2 litre size works well) and cut it so that you are just left with just the bottom of the bottle. Then, poke some hole in the bottom of your bottle to allow water drainage.
- Fill your half bottle with soil and then plant some seeds inside- we used sunflowers and poppies.
- You can then decorate your pots using paints, ribbons, fabrics etc.
- Give your mini-garden a good water and then place on a sunny windowsill where you can watch it grow.