Sustainability, what does it look like to you? 🌱
To me, as a business owner, it's using packaging that is recyclable. It’s avoiding plastics wherever I can. It’s growing my own herbs and only foraging that which grows abundantly around me. It's about using invasive species over endangered ones. Ya know, the obvious things.
But it’s also in pricing my products so that I can earn a living and not burn out while doing it. It’s taking time off when I need to. It’s in turning off my phone when I'm with my family. It’s bringing others into the business to share in both the work and the prosperity. It’s in teaching others so they can make their own medicine if they so choose. It’s in constantly learning and growing and staying openminded. It’s about showing my children what's possible.
It’s about all of this and so much more.
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I try to focus on formulating with herbs that grow underfoot, often referred to as bioregional herbalism.
It's not perfect though, some may argue bioregional should include only native species to that particular area, or to the area from which our ancestors came but I don't personally agree.
Many of the herbs growing wild in this land stretch back across the waters to Europe or Asia from which they were brought to start new gardens of food and medicine.
Some herbs took gently to this new land spread their medicine across communities, entwining themselves beautifully with native species while others have overtaken swaths of depleted land in an effort to consume or to restore.. we don't always know which.
So, when I look to bioregional herbs, I look for those growing wild and in abundance. They include healthy swaths of invasive, naturalized and native species alike.
That doesn't mean I don't bring other herbs into my formulas, including self seeding annuals, ginger, turmeric and cayenne I grow in my greenhouse, the delicate holy basil I brought to my garden...
But it does mean I do my best to focus on those swiftly creeping across the meadows, those lining the river banks and those standing tall in community around my home.