post valentines/new idea

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind, and if you follow us on instagram you know we've been hustling hard through fashion week and valentines day. No one cares about how busy you are but it's worth saying that we've been working really hard to raise some money for some serious projects we're trying to get off the ground...



One of the things that has always lurked around in my master plan for Saipua is how it can have a real effect on the environment. Growing clean flowers is not good enough for me; shouting the benefits of sustainable living (what does that even mean) from my soap box (pun) is not either and I don't like preaching (lie) I just want to make some actual, countable, quantifiable difference.

Lately this idea has taken form in a new scheme; offering NYC florists a breakdown service that composts their flowers and branches, thus keeping thousands of tons of natural materials out of landfills.



Typically, when a wedding is over we send a crew of people to trash the flowers and collect the vases. During the high wedding season we send trucks back to the farm full of spent flowers and branches; haphazardly depositing them into our 'flower compost' heap which is in the woods next to the trucks. Come fall, Nea nests in it; I like to think shes sentimental and misses life at Saipua.

This spring we plan to have a regular truck route that brings flowers from Worlds End and other farms to the city. My dream is to sell these flowers to Saipua and my flower friends and then have them hire us to break down their weddings; bringing those same flowers back to the farm to compost them. If I can make it work, it would make a beautiful cycle - further vertically integrating Saipua, maximizing the use of the truck and keeping more compostable natural materials out of black trash bags and landfills. We'll need to buy a new used box truck; convert it to bio-diesel and install a solar powered refrigeration unit on it.



Have you ever bagged flowers? Sticks poking holes out the sides, a caterpillar or ladybug clinging to a leaf as its shoved into the abyss; unknowingly entombed forever in a 55 gallon, 4 mil contractor bag. I think about bugs in this flower trash eating away for hours and days until they sense in their tiny bug brains that something is awry. (Dramatizing for effect here.)

This plan has so many obstacles. My friend Sarah, an insanely talented and responsible farmer asked me last week: did I really want to become a composting business? I know so little about compost, and it is an incredibly complex process. So many of the flowers that we use in the city are laden with pesticides. The last thing we need at Worlds End is an albatross of a toxic compost heap leaching chemicals into our water stream and soil.



But this side business addresses both of my main goals for SAIPUA: to start to affect real environmental change in the world through flowers and farming and 2. to build a business that can support more and more people.

So I'm going to keep working on this idea. First, I need to talk to some compost brains.