At Sprout, sustainability is at our core

By growing vegetables at home, you can help the environment in so many ways. Reducing food-miles, food-waste, and the need for packaging on vegetables. Freeing up land to be given back to nature, meaning no machinery, supply chains, herbicides, or pesticides. Improving local air quality, and providing much needed food for bees and other pollinators, to name a few.

If you subscribe to Sprout, you will be doing an amazing thing for the environment, so it’s only right we uphold our side of the bargain as well.

Our commitment to you is and supply you with products that are 100% environmentally friendly.

 

Pots

 

We use ECOPOTS – they are awesome. Simple and sleek in design, and lightweight and manoeuvrable - perfect for the city. Durability is key to a sustainable world, and ECOPOTS are made to last, being UV resistant, frost resistant and break proof.

Most importantly they are made from 100% recycled materials, of which 80% is plastic waste. They have also received Recycled Content (QA-CER) certificate, and both the CO2 Neutral Product and the CO2 Neutral Company certificates. Pretty cool, right?

 

 

Soil & Fertiliser

Soil is at the heart of everything in this world. Without it, we wouldn’t exist. It is home to all the nutrients that we need, and is the fundamental building block for the food we grow. It’s also a huge store of carbon – the top metre of the world’s soils contains three times as much carbon as the whole of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we have humans haven’t understood how delicate the soil system is, and our intensive farming techniques have lead to well over 100bn tonnes of carbon to have been lost from the soil. Not only this, but many soils around the world have been stripped of micronutrients due to the overuse of NPK fertilisers, and microbial life due to constant use of herbicides and pesticides. It’s only beginning to dawn on us how serious the consequences could be.

At Sprout, we want to do our part. We get our compost from a company called Fertile Fibres, and it is fully organic and Soil Association Certified. It contains coir, vermiculite, loam and is packed full of organic nutrients so you can grow bumper harvests. The coir has great water retention capabilities, which makes this compost perfect for us to use in pots.

Our subscription plots will have you looking after your soil, planting a rotation of vegetables to keep the soil balanced, and feeding it with organic fertiliser when it needs it.

 

Seeds

All of our seeds are organic, because, at Sprout, we want to support and promote organic farming.

Why is organic farming important?

Unfortunately, the agricultural sector is a major contributor to both biodiversity loss and climate change.

In general, organic farming has lower emissions and uses less energy, has a lower risk of pollution in soils and waterways and also captures and stores more carbon in the soil than conventional (non-organic) farming.

It’s estimated that if all of Europe’s farmland was organic, agricultural emissions could drop by 40-50% by 2050 – and that’s without you growing your own food at home!

 

Packaging

Growing your own vegetables is a great way at cutting out all of that supermarket plastic. At Sprout, we make sure that this benefit isn’t lost through our packaging.

We have tried our best to minimise the amount of packaging we use, by specifically designing custom parcels so we can send the compost out already within the pots. This means no need for any bags for the compost, or any filler material within the parcels to keep the pots safe.

The packaging we do use is made from FSC certified or recycled cardboard and paper. It is all completely recyclable, compostable and biodegradable.

There is no plastic in sight at Sprout (except for the waste plastic which is recycled to make the pots!)