We do quite a lot of things behind the scenes to try and reduce our impact on the world, and to try and make our little patch of land a better place for wildlife. These are the 3 things that we feel most proud of this year…
- Plastic-Free Packaging – We have completely eliminated plastic from our packaging and we’ve had some great feedback about it. We now send all our plants in completely compostable packaging… the cardboard, straw and paper can all be either recycled or composted at home. When you consider that we send out more than a million plants per year, you can imagine how much of a difference that makes – no black plastic (unrecyclable) pots or plant labels like you’d get at a garden centre.
- Bird & Butterfly Meadows – Pictured above is just one of the fields that we have turned over to bird and butterfly wild flower meadow. The photo doesn’t capture the activity of the butterflies – it is quite incredible to stand there on a warm, sunny day as literally hundreds of butterflies flit around your head. We’ll have to video it in the spring, as they don’t exactly hang around while you’re trying to take a photo, but the fields are truly alive with wildlife and it’s wonderful to see. We’ve converted 70 acres of the farm now to wildflowers and plants for wildlife, including overwintering bird food seed mixes, “bumble bird” mix for all our pollinators, and traditional grasses and legumes to fix nitrogen in the soil.
- Organically grown in unheated polytunnels – We grow all our veg plants organically, with no pesticides or anything like that, and we’ve got full accreditation from the Soil Association. Our polytunnels are not heated, we just rely on the good old British sunshine to heat them and give our plants the warmth that they need. This does mean that occasionally some crops are a little slow to get going, and occasionally some crops suffer from pest or disease, but we’d rather take this risk and do the right thing.