Eco-friendly one step at a time

There were two driving forces behind starting an organic farm: my passion around growing food, and my love of Planet Earth and wanting to be a good steward of it.

Conserving the earth’s resources and treating our big home well is not just about giant actions. In fact, I think it’s much more about the small steps we take every day to reduce our footprints and be better stewards.

Here on the farm, we’re always thinking of ways to take better care of our planet, whether they’re small actions or on a larger scale. We believe that our daily actions have a big impact on our environmental footprint, and we help move the needle toward more sustainable agricultural practices.

By growing organically, choosing recyclable pots for our plant starts, and reusing materials whenever possible, our daily farm tasks help us practice the values we care about.

Choosing the more eco-friendly path is a challenge and takes a conscious effort. It’s often more time-consuming, more inconvenient, and even more expensive. But to us, the rewards of taking small, daily actions towards sustainability far outweigh the costs.

Consider these:

• Because we don’t use toxic chemicals on our plants, we get to spend our days with bumble bees, honey bees, butterflies, ladybugs and hummingbirds who love pollinating our chemical-free flowers.
• When our arms, hands and faces are buried in plants as we prune, harvest and plant, we feel safe and comfortable knowing we’re not touching harmful chemicals and instead get to enjoy the aromas of leaves and flowers.
• Water is vital to life. We love water and are grateful for it. We feel good about protecting our watershed from toxic pesticides and herbicides that leach into the soil and into underground aquifers.
• Many of our customers share the same values around sustainability and environmental stewardship. It brings us a lot of joy to offer organic plant starts, lavender and produce to our community!

These are just a few of the ways we feel rewarded by doing what we can to be more eco-friendly.

Of course, there’s lots of room for improvement on our farm! That’s why we’re always finding new steps to take towards sustainability, no matter how small they might seem.

Join my challenge and make a list of what you will do this season to be a better steward of the earth.

What habits and practices will you take up or drop to reduce carbon emissions, reduce waste and make our planet a more beautiful place?

Here are the top 5 things I’ll be working on to continue shrinking my personal environmental footprint:

1. Planning ahead and grouping up errands into fewer days so I can drive less and reduce car emissions. This is a great way to be more time-efficient, too!
2. Making a conscious effort to use less plastic – That means buying groceries, toiletries and cleaning supplies with more environmentally conscious packaging. On the farm and at home, we do this already. But we can always continue to be conscious and find even more ways to cut down on the resources we’re using.
3. Finally setting up my home composting barrel. (In the summer, we put our kitchen scraps into our farm compost pile or give them to the chickens. But in the winters, we haven’t been able to compost our food scraps since it’s too cold outside for quick decomposition.) Check out these tips for household winter composting.
4. My family’s going to enjoy “Meatless Monday” 3 days per week.
5. Recycling, better. Lots of things we think are getting recycled actually end up in landfills! Why? Because it’s not sorted or prepared properly. This season, I’m making a conscious effort to up my recycling game: removing bottle caps and rings and cleaning out plastic containers before tossing them into the recycle bin; re-purposing items like containers and clothing instead of recycling them; using less things that need to be recycled and instead can be re-used for years – opting for glass and fabric in place of plastic, and choosing quality over quantity. This is what it takes to be evermore eco-friendly: evaluating what we are doing and how can we do it better, even if we are “recycling” already.

Now, it’s your turn!

What will you do to conserve our planet’s resources?

Share your ideas with us and our readers! Not only will your thoughts inspire others, but they’ll also help you commit to taking small steps toward more sustainability.

So tell us in the comments below: What are 5 things you’ll do to shrink your footprint?