Tea Bags: We Need Feedback!
We need some help from you! We finally have enough castings to start packaging castings – and thanks to Green Grocer, we have a sales outlet. We’re playing around with ideas for reusable worm casting tea bags as a convenient way for you to store and use worm castings to make “tea.”
Vote: Three Packaging Options
glean tea bag packaging
- Label stapled to paper bag which protrudes from
- Label stapled to paper and muslin bag which are flush
- Casting directly in tea bag with no paper
So here are three similar bags. Included in the kit are 1/2lb worm castings, a reusable tea bag, and maybe another bag to hold the extra castings. This will make 10-15gal of compost tea and all of the packaging is biodegradable in your home compost pile (or ours if you don’t have one). MSRP is $4 and, where possible, bulk castings will be available so you don’t have to re-buy the tea bag every time.
We just want to know (answer any or all in however much detail you are willing to give):
a. Would you buy this? How about now?
b. Which package is most appealing to you (and ideally why).
c. Would you rather buy a bigger or smaller kit?
How to Send Feedback
Answer in the comments, @gleanorganics on Twitter, Glean Organics on Facebook, or email worms[shift+2]gleanorganics[dot]com. Thanks for helping!
About Compost Tea
Like the kind you drink, garden tea is simply made by steeping compost, manure, worm castings, or other microbial rich stuff in water (different materials make “better” or “worse” tea in many opinions; ours is the best ;-p). There are much more complicated methods but our tea bags have everything you need – just add water!
Feeding your plants is especially important in these hot, dry late summer months. Casting tea has the added benefit of boosting your plants immune system as well as the health of the soil in your garden. This keeps your plants happy, healthy, and productive.
Announcing in.gredients
Glean Organics is one prong of a larger…pitchfork? Anyway, forget the metaphor – the team at Brothers Lane, our parent company, has been busy plotting how we can improve ourselves while contributing to the sustainability of human life on earth. We’ve considered non-profit and for-profit endeavors; we’ll likely pursue both. We like the triple-bottom-line, for-profit model – after all, the economy drives the world and the businesses that drive the economy have a profound impact on today and tomorrow.
So we’re excited to announce our newest project, in.gredients, designed to eliminate packaging waste and food waste at the grocery store. Packaging, usually made of plastic, has a very short functional life and an incredibly long life as waste – which chokes waterways and fills the land for centuries. Food waste is yet another major issue with our modern food system. Glean Organics was created to keep food waste out of landfills, but a dirty secret of the food system is tons (actually millions of tons) of nutritious, healthy food is never eaten-it is discarded because of cosmetic problems, overly cautious Use By dates, and our general fear of food. 40 percent of what we grow is discarded. While this happens at ever step in the food chain, from farm to fork, in.gredients works to eliminate wasted food at every level. Working with local farmers, selling bulk items, and integrating into the local community in.gredients allows customers to get exactly what they need when they need it. We’re really excited to bring this project to life in Austin in 2011.
Food waste at home
One of the hardest places to reduce food waste is in our homes. Life is hectic. We know eating out isn’t that healthy. We have every intention of eating right, but often times that beautiful healthy food just rots in the fridge until we finally throw it out and buy a new stuff to start spoiling. It’s an expensive habit that only feeds microbes.
While making a salad, I was digging through the fridge and came across this unappealing cucumber. We’ve been trained to not think twice and just toss it (ideally in the compost, but all too often in the garbage). Granted, that was my first thought…but then a little voice – that of my poor southern Italian ancestry – gave me a brilliant idea. An idea so simple that not even Billy Mays could sell a gadget to do it: cut off the bad part and eat the rest. As silly as it sounds, this is a profound lesson that we do not remember in a world of cheap ubiquitous food and hyper-cautious food safety ideas.
15 seconds later I’d sliced off the moldy face and a couple soft spots. What I was left with was a crisp, delicious cucumber for my salad. So the next time you clean out the fridge, consider whether you can save any part of that spoiling food. Be safe, but don’t be too cautious. There’s great food lurking just under that top layer of mold.
Glean Organics is open…
The path from idea to operational has been long and gradual. Things have progressed so fluidly that we didn’t really have a point where Glean didn’t exist one moment and did exist the next. I suppose that, at the end of the day, the goal was to divert food waste from the landfill using in-vessel composting and worms. That goal’s been reached.
This week we took the final step necessary to claim “Glean’s up and running” by introducing worms to the pilot facility. It’s exciting; for the first time we can run our composting process start-to-finish.
The We
Glean Organics is my pet project, but I always say we because it’s not just my countless hours that have gone into this project. From logistics, marketing, branding, and research to building out the pilot site, everyone at Brothers Lane has been instrumental.
Pilot Facility
Sounds cool, doesn’t it? One of our main design criteria was low barrier to entry, which means we do a lot of work by hand. Large composting facilities require millions of dollars to build – but not a Glean facility. The pilot site is the shorter end of the shoestring. By scrounging up parts and making do, I’ve only put a few hundred dollars in (mostly for the worms). Still, this has been invaluable because (1) we are up and running, not just talking about it, and (2) we can experiment, prove out new ideas, and evolve the operational model.
Oregon City Pilot Facility
(From back to front)
A small workbench, mainly to hold up the monitoring computer. This continuously measures the compost’s temperature so that each batch has an associated thermal profile (required for a regulation known as PFRP). It also alerts us if something’s going wrong so we can take corrective action. I borrowed incident management from the other side of our business (ask me about integrating JIRA with a toaster).
Wrapped in insulating blankets is the digester in which food waste is composted. A fan – in this case a shop-vac – allows us to force fresh air into the compost substrate. After 5-10days this has finished the primary stage of composting and cools down. We call this digested compost because it’s not yet cured and wouldn’t be a finished compost product for another three to 12 months.
Gray bin is the overflow waiting for a turn in the digester. I mixed up too much stuff to compost
The worm rack is next. Worms need surface area and since we have very little we have to go vertical. Ultimately we will need much higher densities but this is good for proving it out.
The teal bin is where I keep the worm food. This is the digested compost from the in-vessel composter which is used to feed the worms.
There are some other bits and pieces in there, but that’s the important stuff.
Our novelty is that Glean operates in urban areas to allow anyone to compost. A major drawback to large compost facilities is that neighborhoods and restaurants don’t produce enough food waste to be economically viable (have you seen the price of gas lately?). Large facilities located far outside of town have to go after the low-hanging fruit, but we can get up into the canopy ;-). Because we operate in high density areas, we have to make the most of our space. The pilot site is organized to mimic a half-size shipping container to see just how much throughput we can muster. We’ll keep you posted on our progress and announce new projects once we can call them official.
Happy Earth Day!
From the Glean team, Happy Earth Day 2011! Since 1970 Earth Day has reminded folks of environmental issues they have the power to resolve. Consider today what you can do to consume less energy, reduce waste and pollution, and live more sustainably.
Here’s some fun stuff to spark your Earth Day spirit:
01. 10 apps that make it easy to “go green”
02. Free coffee at Starbucks (with a re-useable travel mug)
03. 40 Earth Day deals from stores across the country
Enjoy, and read more of our posts for ideas on sustainable living/how composting can help you and your community reduce waste!
Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography
