Flourish MicroFarm
Black Bear Road V0G 1Y0 Rossland, BC, Canada

We are so stoked to participate in the #buybasin festival! Thank you to Columbia Basin Trust, @FestivalSeekers and Basin Business Advisors Program for hosting this great event to celebrate local business! Be sure to check out Bombshack in #rosslandbc to see their live feature earlier today!

We're going LIVE for the #BuyBasin Festival! Tune in, right here on our Facebook page, today at 1:00 pm! Always fresh, always delicious - that's the Flourish guarantee and we're going to tell you why!... RSVP to the #BuyBasin Festival Facebook event page to catch all the fun: https://www.facebook.com/events/1106232193230536/ You can also catch our broadcast featured on Basin Business Advisors Program and FestivalSeekers Thank you to the Columbia Basin Trust for this opportunity.

In our final post about food packaging, we first wanted to acknowledge that from our experience, most small farm and food businesses are doing the best they can to navigate the world of food packaging, and as mentioned earlier in this conversation, you can almost guarantee that your favourite local farmer cares about this! Here are some of our top tips and strategies to help you understand food packaging and make informed decisions: Talk to your farmers! Ask them questions! ...Ask them why they package the way they do! Do your own research, too. Chances are you'll learn a lot more about the packaging industry than you may have wanted. . . Check the package when you buy something. Is it recyclable in your area? Can it be thrown in your backyard compost? What is it made from? Get creative and come up with handy ways to reuse packaging. I can't tell you how many folks have told me about and sent me pictures of their seedlings planted in repurposed clamshell containers! So smart! Take time to learn about the recycling system in your area. Call places up and ask questions! If you're super passionate about waste management and you don't get the answers you like, make a plan! Who can you talk to about it? Is there an organization in your area that takes on 'green initiatives' that you can volunteer with or learn more from? Contact your MLA and speak up about your concerns - there is a lot of plastic-ban type stuff coming down the pipeline and this is the perfect time to make your voice heard. Don't jump to conclusions too soon. You might be surprised what you learn and you might be even more surprised with how much thought your favourite farmer, bakery, restaurant, or other food producer has put into their packaging. Tell them you notice and you applaud their effort. Feedback goes such a long way! If you are a farmer or food producer struggling with your packaging - don't give up! It's a long, bumpy road to the right answer for your business, but a good solution exists out there. Also, be open to change and to adapting to better solutions as they come along, because the packaging industry is constantly developing! continued in comments!!

After spending a long time researching packaging and what options were viable in our area, what we settled on as the most responsiblechoice for our businesscurrently is post-consumer recycled plastic clamshells. Yet, when we made this decision... we couldn't source the containers that we wanted! Ugh! To spend all that time finding the (for now) perfect option only to learn that we couldn't have it shipped here was really frustrating. So when Flourish kicked off last year we... were using containers that had only about 20% recycled plastic content. Well, this wasn't good enough for us. We are stoked to say that through perseverance and the help of our local wholesale retailer (Marino's Wholesale in #trailbc) we have finally been able to source the containers we wanted. They are 100% post-consumer recycled plastic and each container is made from about 2.5 recycled water bottles! How cool is that? There is zero "first generation plastic" material (reused material instead!) and the containers themselves are reusable, and they are still a #1 recyclable plastic, which is easy to recycle in our region. To top it off we opted for 100% recycled paper labels. So to reiterate - this is not the "perfect" solution, but right now we feel pretty good about our decision. We often get asked why we don't use plant plastic containers. At the onset of our research we really wanted plant plastic to be the answer for us, but after a lot of investigation and discussion with other farmers and foodies, we learned that it simply wasn't a viable option for us right now. First, in our region there is no commercial composting facility, so there is no where to manage the plant plastic waste. These containers look like regular plastic, so often they are mistaken for regular plastic and they get thrown into the recycling bin. The downside is they are not recyclable and they can contaminate the entire recycling stream! We were also concerned with how the plant plastic is made - what is it derived from? Continued in comments! (there is just too much to say!)