We’ve shrunk our carbon footprint!

We have shrunk Tayport’s carbon footprint by an amazing 2.9 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over 2016 growing season! Just to illustrate – this would be roughly equal to emissions caused by 2,100 one-way small car trips from Tayport to Dundee.

The savings came from growing more food locally, using surplus apples from Tayport gardens and from reductions in short-distance car travel (for details see the ‘infographic’ below).

It’s great to think that we all made a real difference in preventing the progress of climate change by simply changing where we get our food.

We would like to thank all of the amazing volunteers, too many to mention here, who helped with growing, harvests, and produce sales at the Garden. Thanks to all who have  bought and used our produce too.

Will and his apple-harvest helpers have worked wonders with saving our surplus apples from going to waste last autumn and using them to produce the first edition of Tayport long-life apple juice. Yum!

But perhaps our biggest thanks go out to the Grow@Home participants who not only took on growing more food in their own gardens, but also meticulously recorded their harvests – Frances, Cathy, John, Julie and Frank, Kaska, Janice, Fraser, Margaret and Marion. Your harvests accounted for an impressive 23% of the total recorded produce weight! And let’s not forget our Grow@Home bloggers – thanks to Cathy and Kaska for sharing their growing stories throughout the year.

And last but not least we are very grateful to Courtney and Frank for the time they invested in crunching the carbon emission numbers – lots of hard work went into those simple numbers showing us so beautifully how much progress we have made.

Let’s grow and eat even more locally this year:)

You can help by volunteering at the Garden, joining Grow@Home, donating, harvesting or juicing apples in October or simply by buying our produce at our Tayport Harbour stall on Sunday afternoons over the summer.