Earth Day Every Day
April is the month that hosts Earth Day. The grass greens up, insects hatch, flowers bloom and trees bud; it’s a glorious time of ethereal beauty all around us. One late frost can change the landscape; but, persistent as it is - Spring will push on and beauty will surround. It’s the perfect time of year to take in our surroundings and fully appreciate all that inhabits our natural world. It’s also the perfect time to take stock and evaluate how we impact that beautiful world.
The first dandelion of spring pops up and share’s its warm welcoming yellow hues.
Recently we were involved in a sticker project with our kiddos and each holiday had a sticker, Earth Day was one of them. Our inquisitive oldest asked “What’s Earth Day?” - I think expecting that it might be Earth’s birthday. Excited to share, I listed off activities that I had learned as a kid were some ways to celebrate the day: picking up litter, composting, recycling, planting things. The response I got was - “oh, like every day”. Huh. Yep, I guess you have a point. And on she went unfazed. Checkmate, my little friend.
Fast forward a few weeks and we’re seeding another tray of plants to transplant to our garden - and I find myself listening to a mini-lecture on all the ways our farm cares for our planet and our people. The little hands helping me are busy, and so is her brain as she rattles off different things we do on our farm that keeps trash out of the landfill and instead makes food for our plants and people. And that’s where I thought, she’s written it for me - that’s the perfect April Farm Pointer.
this might not be the exact tray, but this was one of many this winter
How can every day be Earth day? For us, it’s a mindset. We can choose to sit back and take in the natural rhythms and see where we fit - instead of trying to strong arm them to conform to our ways. It’s also our choices - can we choose to consume less things? The things that we consume, can we choose materials that last and/or at the end of their useful life they can breakdown or at least not be toxic? Can we choose daily consumables that biodegrade and are safe for our water supply? Can we choose to know who produces our food and the practices that they use? For us, it’s choices.
Here on the farm, we have a variety of ways that we choose to employ these mindset shifts and choices. First, our flagship product Stone Mountain Suds Laundry Soap. Each of our ingredients in this product are from the Earth. They are minerals, oils, fats, water - compounds that are naturally existent. When you do laundry using our products, the water that enters your septic, or your city’s sewer stream is not adding any toxicity from your laundry soap. No additional endocrine disrupting. No PFAS (the forever chemical category). No added risk of cancer. By choosing a load of laundry with our natural soap - you are choosing to care for our water supply, our planet and the people who inhabit it. Read through or jump to the bottom for an offer to join our clean laundry club!
When it comes to our non-soap products on the farm - there’s a neat cycle that feels rather perfect in some ways. Let’s start with our laying hens. We feed them certified organic feed ingredients, from farmers who we’ve asked questions of and learned their practices, and in doing so we prevent the bringing of chemicals onto our farm, and keep them out of the food made here. The laying hens eat that food, and produce lovely rich chicken manure, and beautiful brown-shelled, orange-yolked, delicious eggs.
We take the sawdust shavings, straw and chicken manure from the chicken coop, and we compost it. That ‘waste’ product becomes black-gold. Nutrient rich, organic matter rich, garden nourishing, compost. We will incorporate this beautiful product into our garden soils to add to the nutrient density of the food we grow. The eggs, we will eat of course, but even the shell housing that wondrous nutrient density, will not go to waste. We take our shells and collect them daily and roast and crunch or sometimes just crunch them up and offer them to our chickens as a calcium supplement - or include them in our compost as a calcium boost (particularly for our tomato plants).
On our cook days - the days that we prepare our lovely Nourished by On Point Farm foods for you - we have lots of veggie scraps, peels, seeds, etc. Rather than putting those into a trash bin, we feed them to our chickens. They’re delighted to have them, and they will make us more eggs and more compost. We can leave the kitchen for the day having made somewhere between 40 and 90 pints of products and only produce about a 5-gallon pails worth (or less) of trash. That’s the equivalent of feeding 40-90 people lunch and only having a 5-gallon pail of trash to haul away. Think of your break-room at lunch, or the last gathering you attended or hosted… would all of the garbage have fit in one five gallon pail?
And these are just a few of the many examples of the ways that we reduce, reuse and recycle around here.
We see ourselves as stewards of our resources. We have been blessed with our farm property that was a part of a farm decades ago. Little by little we are attempting to steward relationships with the soil that is here, the animals and the plants that we introduce to live harmoniously here for the benefit of not only us, but the people who allow us to feed them and for this piece of land for decades to come. In order to do this, we must think deeply about the choices we make - what we bring into our house, what we bring onto our farm, what enters our water and food supply - and how it impacts the living things who call this corner of Earth home. Not just the people, not just the animals, but also the plants, the wildlife, the soil microbes.
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If you’re reading this and you don’t yet use our laundry soap, I’d like to invite you to try it. We have a new 16oz sample size that we can ship anywhere in the US. This will give you up to 16 loads to try our soap and see what you think. Do you want to skip the sample and jump in and join the Earth Day Every (laundry) Day Club? Use the code EARTHDAY for $7.50 off of your first laundry soap order!
If you’re not sure if the laundry soap you currently use is harmful to your health - I would encourage you to type it into this database and see what the results are. Where it says “search…2,500 products” type yours in. Start with brand name, and ‘laundry detergent’ and then you can select your variety from the list.
To give you a reference, when we type each of the ingredients of our laundry soap into this database, we would receive a score of “A” and the only ingredient that poses any risk at all is to us, the soap maker (as inhalation of a powdered ingredient), but we manage that risk carefully as we make the soap.
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So here’s to health. Healthier soils. Healthier environment. Healthier food. Healthier people. Healthier communities. All working together for a healthier planet. We’re here in our corner doing what we can, for the love of people.
until next time,
Kate
