BENEFIT COMPANY 

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Groovy Greens, LLC is registered in Pennsylvania as a Benefit Company, this means our company exists to provide a public benefit.

 

In addition to growing and selling our food in an environmentally conscious manner,

our stated public benefits are as follows:

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1. To provide healthy, delicious and nutrient dense food for local people, including those in need

2. To provide educational opportunities for local people to learn about growing food, composting and improving soil health 

3. To foster community spirit

 

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As part of being a Benefit Company, we are required to produce an annual report that quantifies all these benefits. 

Download and Read our Annual Reports below.

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Delicious, Healthy, Nutrient Dense Food

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These three attributes are inextricably linked - it has been scientifically proven that nutrient density confers both taste and health benefits.  We, as humans (like many other animals), instinctively know when something is healthy (not that we always choose to eat it!) but, when was the last time you bit into something and thought, ummm this is delicious - maybe the first homegrown tomato or strawberry of the season?  With the advent of our industrial food complex, where food is grown on poor, chemically-poisoned soils, picked before it is ripe and transported thousands of miles to our supermarkets. Our taste buds and our bodies have been being starved of stimulation and nutrients respectively.  Local food, grown on nutrient balanced soil, high in organic matter without chemicals is the answer to this problem!

 

Check out the Bionutrient Food Association for more information on this topic and citizen science projects they are conducting.

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Feeding People in Need

 

Even before COVID 19, food security was an issue for many people in our region.  We have chosen to support both the Lord’s Pantry in Ottsville and the Quakertown Food Pantry by growing and providing food and other donations to these organizations. In these times of need, we are hosting a community Farm Stand, located in Springtown with produce grown by members of the community to give away, trade or take on an honesty basis.  

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Educational Opportunities

 

Lorna taught the Organic Vegetable Gardening Series at Northampton Community College for nine years, she has brought to bring that experience of teaching to Groovy Greens.  We offer a selection of gardening related classes - see Groovy Gardening Classes for more details.

 

Fostering Community

 

Our weekly in-person greens pick ups provide an opportunity for customers to interact through chance encounters, maybe reconnect with old friends or to make new ones.  In 2021 we held a social gathering to thank our customers and community members.  We hope to hold many more in the years to come.

 

ENVIRONMENT & SUSTAINABILITY

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Adaptive Re-use of Buildings and Materials

 

The environmental impact of our operations is forefront in our minds at all times.  Our unofficial motto has become "use what we have" and Dave has a lot of "stuff"! Since the property used to be a garden center (for many years prior to that it was a working farm/homestead), there are a lot of left over materials that we have employed into our current operations. The most obvious of which is the greenhouse itself, previously used for starting nursery plants, now it is used to grow our baby greens and micro greens.  The tables we are growing on were modified from the old garden center display tables, an old animal shed is now the packing shed and we use a part of the large barn to germinate our plants in.

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We are re-using some of the old garden center containers for growing our delectable pea shoots hydroponically and are re-using much of the old watering equipment.  Plus we're setting up an old flat-transporting trolley to grow our micro greens indoors over the summer and winter months.  Even the raised beds were constructed from old fencing and and soil from a landscaping customer's vegetable garden.

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Environmentally Conscious Resource Use

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Apart from using what we have, we had to purchase many items in order to get the growing operation underway, again though we have been mindful of the environmental impact in every decision.  For example, instead of using peat-based growing media (which is unsustainably "mined" from peat bogs), we chose to use coir or coconut fiber based media which is a waste product of the coconut industry*.  Admittedly there are not many coconuts grown in the United States, so the fiber has to travel a long way to get to Pennsylvania, however, on balance, we feel it is a better choice.  Other examples are using rice hulls instead of mined perlite*, the former being another waste product and for the micro greens we chose to use a hemp mat hydroponic system since hemp can be and is grown in our local area (not for these particular hemp mats - but hopefully in the future it will be).  All growing media is recycled either by composting in a an enclosed tumbler or by our only livestock on the farm - our red wiggler worms.  They enjoy munching on both the waste greens and the hemp mats, and they turn it into an amazing vermicast product which we either sprinkle on our beds or make into a compost tea to enhance the microbiology in our growing beds.  In the future, we may sell this black gold to our customers.

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*2023 Update - Due to difficulties with nutrient balance and drainage, we used a compost/peat mix and added perlite/rice hulls mix for our new outdoor beds. We also used a similar compost/peat potting mix for growing our seedlings.  We continue to strive to reduce non-renewable resources and to find coco-fiber based mixes that perform well in a commercial setting. 

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Packaging

 

Although packaging only amounts to a small proportion of the materials used in our operations - it is the most customer visible and is in some cases a single use item.  Most produce elsewhere is sold in single used fossil-fuel based plastic bags.  We decided to try and change the paradigm by offering customer either re-usable/returnable organically grown, fair trade made cotton bags or home compostable "plastic" bags made from plant materials. Our micro containers are all returnable, some re-purposed from supermarket grocery packaging.

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For more information, download and read our 2021 Annual Benefit Report.

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USING SCIENCE TO IMPROVE SOIL, PLANT AND HUMAN HEALTH

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There are three main strands to soil health - physical, chemical and biological.  In this section we will focus on the chemical and biological aspects of soil and growing media.

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In order to grow the highest quality food, we have had the greenhouse bed media and in ground soil tested at a laboratory several times.  We have been influenced by many different soil management "philosophies" all now fall within the general realm of regenerative agriculture.  With respect to soil chemistry, we follow the soil balancing or remineralization recommendations based on Steve Soloman's & Erica Reinhart's book/calculator "The Intelligent Gardener" (see www.growabundant.com).  Based on the laboratory results we add minerals to move our media and soil towards the "ideal" mineral balance for plant growth.  The majority of our amendments are naturally occurring and include Wollastinite, Rock Phosphate, Aragonite, etc. A few such as manganese sulfate and zinc sulfate are man-made salts but are used at very small quantities - these are micronutrients that are only required in minute quantities in plants but are essential for maximizing photosynthesis. (For example manganese is an essential element in many enzymes relating to photosynthesis). Sometimes we apply these micronutrients via foliar spraying (spraying the leaves).  A broad mixture of micronutrients are also added to the media and soil via adding rock dust, kelp (seaweed) and azomite (a naturally occurring clay mineral).

 

As mentioned in the previous section, we chose to use a coconut fiber based media (as an alternative to peat) for our beds in the greenhouse and microgreen trays.  This comes with its own growing challenges as it is not a totally inert material, due to its origins it has very high levels of sodium and potassium which causes an imbalance for plant growth - they need much more calcium than is present naturally, therefore we need to add calcium before using the fiber.  We add it by soaking the fiber in an organics rich mixture of calcium carbonate, molasses and kelp.  We add magnesium using our own vermicasts which contains coffee grounds from a local cafe.

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The third and arguably the most important strand of soil health is biology.  Just like humans have a microbiome - located all over our bodies including our intestinal tracts, both plants and soil have an equivalent microbiome which comprises of bacteria, protozoa, fungi and microarthropods.  Modern chemical-based agriculture has adversely affected this biome in plants, soil and humans.  Regenerative agricultural practices focus on restoring and improving this biology.  The microbes are important to the health of plants as they unlock the nutrients from the soil or media making them available to the plants, in turn the plants reward the microbes with food - mostly in the form of sugars in a self-fulling cycle.  At Groovy Greens we sample our soil and media on a regular basis and observe the life under a 400x microscope, our goal being to increases the diversity as much as possible.  This is achieved by the addition of compost - regular and vermi (worm) castings which contain a vast array of soil biology. 

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