Sustainability at Wade Greens

We grow in towers, not rows

Most of our produce grows in vertical hydroponic towers rather than in the ground. Water circulates through the system and returns to it, so a plant takes what it needs and the rest is used again instead of draining away.

That is the whole point, and it is worth being specific about why. In conventional field and bench growing, irrigation water carries fertilizer down past the root zone and out of the growing area. Nutrient runoff is the most heavily regulated environmental issue in this trade and the hardest one for a small operation to control, because by the time the water has left you cannot get it back. A closed system does not have that problem to manage. The water stays in the loop until a plant drinks it.

Towers also grow upward. The same footprint carries several times the plants a bench would, which means less ground disturbed, no tillage and no erosion.

Nothing grows in open ground

What is not in a tower is in a pot or a raised bed, under glass in a maintained greenhouse or indoors. Nothing we sell is grown in open field soil.

That is the same principle as the towers, applied to the rest of the farm. A raised bed or a pot has edges. The soil stays where we put it, the water goes in at the top and stays in the container, and what the plant does not use is still sitting in the root zone rather than running off the end of a row. Contained growing is the simplest form of runoff control there is.

Growing under cover also lets us plant to a schedule instead of to the weather. A crop is not lost to a late frost, a hailstorm or a wet August — and a lost crop is the most wasteful thing that can happen on a farm, because every input has been spent and nothing comes out the other end.

Keeping trouble out instead of treating it later

Raised beds and pots do something else worth saying out loud: they keep grubs, cutworms and the rest of the soil-dwelling crowd out of the root zone in the first place. A greenhouse keeps most of the flying ones out too. That is physical exclusion, and it is the cheapest pest control there is, because it costs nothing per application and nothing goes onto the plant.

Disease gets the same treatment, and it is where most of our effort actually goes. Nearly everything that goes wrong in a greenhouse is easier to prevent than to cure, so the work is unglamorous and constant: clean containers and clean tools, plants spaced so air moves between them and foliage dries, water managed so it is not sitting where it should not be, and walking the benches often enough to catch something in its first week rather than its third. Anything that does turn up comes out early rather than being nursed along next to healthy stock.

What still gets through, we handle with integrated pest management — monitor, intervene narrowly, only when it is warranted. We do not spray on a calendar, and we do not use pesticides on what we grow. That is only possible because prevention is doing most of the work.

Soil that has already had one life

Our soil and amendments come from landscaping companies in the area — composted topsoil that would otherwise be hauled off and tipped. We take it, screen it, and grow in it.

This is the same decision as the towers, made at the other end of the farm. Buying in finished, composted material means we are not depending on heavy synthetic feeding to get a crop, and the less soluble fertilizer goes into a system, the less of it can ever leave one.

We compost too, and it goes back into that same soil. Trimmings, culls and spent growth from the farm are composted and worked into the reclaimed topsoil before it goes into production. We are not making growing medium from scratch and we are not going to claim we are — what we are doing is making sure the material we take in leaves here richer than it arrived, and that our own green waste never becomes somebody else's landfill problem.

It also keeps us out of a supply chain most of this industry is still in. The default growing medium in the nursery trade is a peat-based bagged mix. Peat bogs are among the densest carbon stores on earth, they take thousands of years to form, and harvesting them releases what they have been holding. Growers in the UK and Europe are being moved off peat by regulation; most of the US trade has not started. Reclaimed local material keeps usable soil out of a landfill and keeps us off peat by default.

The honest limit: we source this material, we do not produce it. We can tell you where it came from and what we have done with it since. We cannot audit how it was made before it reached us. We would rather say that plainly than imply a chain of custody we do not have.

What we buy, and how we pick it

Sourcing is where a small farm makes most of its environmental decisions, and we treat it that way — what a thing is made of and where it came from are part of the price, not a footnote to it.

Our planters are recycled. Our sheets and trays are recycled. Our shipping boxes are reclaimed material.

Horticultural plastic is a quiet, large problem. Black nursery pots are difficult for municipal recycling to sort, and most of them are used exactly once. We buy reused and recycled where it exists, we keep pots in rotation here for as long as they hold together, and we would rather hand you a plant in a pot with a scuff on it than a new one.

If you are local and you have our pots stacked behind the shed, bring them back. We will use them.

Where we spend the most: water and light

Growing indoors and under glass trades sunlight and rainfall for electricity and a water bill. That is the real cost of this method and we are not going to write around it.

What we do about it: lights run on schedules matched to what each crop actually needs rather than around the clock, fixtures are chosen for efficiency, and the growing space is kept tight so we are not conditioning air for nothing. Water, as above, recirculates rather than being drawn fresh every cycle.

What we have not done yet: metered it properly. We would rather tell you we are working on measuring it than publish a number we cannot stand behind.

Short distances

We grow in Lineville and we sell in the Southeast. Produce is harvested and out within days — no warehouse, no ripening truck, no cross-country leg. Our farmers market route and local delivery cover most of where it goes.

For plants, we stock what actually lives here. A plant chosen for zone 8a and planted in zone 8a is the most sustainable plant there is, because the replacement never has to be grown, shipped or bought. We do not sell anything invasive, and we do not sell anything under legal restriction.