It's Not Easy Being Green
Those of us ‘of a certain age’ may remember a little puppet frog called Kermit sitting on a tree trunk, singing rather sadly about being the colour of leaves. But as the song goes “green is the colour of Spring” and that can only be a good thing.
Here at The School House B&B in Shropshire we have been busy gardening during lockdown and while we’re no Tom and Barbara (again, apologies to younger readers!), we do like to try and grow things that will be good for ourselves as well as our guests.
Last summer our lettuce crop was very successful, so we were able to serve home-grown salad leaves with our ever-popular bedroom picnics. Our tomatoes on the other hand, a staple of The School House B&B breakfast, were not so fruitful.
This winter, Dave has been busy researching different types of tomato (cordon and bush, who knew?) to try and improve our chances of having something to serve to our guests for breakfast. Last year’s crop ended up as a Green Tomato and Banana Chutney, but in the spirit of keeping our food miles low this does go very well with our cheese selection bedroom picnics.
Strawberries were extremely popular on our breakfast menu last year, so we have planted some Senga Sengana varieties to get us started. Hopefully we’ll be able to harvest some this year, if not we will keep going until we have so many that we’re making strawberry jam!
Of course, being green isn’t just about being green-fingered. Looking ahead to Earth Day on April 22nd, we are increasingly aware of the impact that our small business may be having on the wider environment. It’s important to us to do our bit.
When we’re able to re-open, our bedroom picnics will again be popular as we expect many of our guests will choose to eat in. While the bulk of our ingredients are locally-sourced and we serve it on washable dishes, we do find ourselves using too much plastic wrap to cover items. To tackle this problem, we recently bought some Shropshire-made beeswax food covers from Bee Biotic. Not only do they look much prettier than clingfilm, but they will also help us to reduce our non-recyclable waste.
In the guest bedrooms, we now have separate waste and recycling bins. We have always removed plastic bottles from bins to put in the recycling, but now it will be much easier to sort our rubbish out.
We look forward to being able to welcome guests back to The School House B&B in late Spring when it is not just the Shropshire Hills that are green, but us as well.