Natives, Beds, and Crops- Oh My!

Hello Future Fit Foods Fans,

While our Future Fit Foods' cooking is being scaled up in a natural but Wonka-like fashion, we have been restoring the Future Fit Foods Mother Ship here in Colorado intending to regenerate our local ecosystem and community.

We have been busy getting our hands dirty and our thumbs green.

Our first chore was setting up a small orchard for fruit trees that will bring us sustenance and resilience as we roll into the future. A collection of apples, cherries, plums, and peaches that are playing a role in restoring an unused barren space formally a large rusty shed that has already brought us beauty from their flowers, nourishment for our neighbor’s beehives and has just begun bearing fruit.

We look forward to watching these trees grow in the years to come and provide shade for our future hammocks below.

Our second chore was building, and planting raised beds. Paloma is a certified master gardener, so we are making the most of her green thumbs. We used the simple cardboard method to block the weeds and created a generous foundation of rich organic soil (60%), compost and mulch (30%) and organic fertilizer (10%). We bought many of our vegetable plants from a local job training program right out of their greenhouse and spent a long afternoon setting up a basic drip irrigation system which is now helping carefully nurture these vegetables while conserving water.

The raised beds are an ongoing reminder of our Future Fti Foods' soups and the effort, time, and hands involved in getting produce to market and into products connecting us to the system and drawing deep appreciation.

And finally, we have begun removing the evasive lawn grass that many of our businesses and homes in the United States are covered with. Even “Kentucky Bluegrass”, as local as it sounds, it was brought to the US from far away ecosystems in Eurasia and parts of North Africa; while we love Bluegrass music, we will pass on this type of lawn grass.

We are instead planting all native Colorado plants and grasses that are drought tolerant and work with our local ecosystems, rather than against them, to prevent erosion, enrich the soil, save our scarce water, and provide shelter and food for wildlife and pollinators. They will also shine with their beauty for us and our community. This is a small thing we can do to mitigate climate change.

So, get your hands dirty. After 15 months of hand sanitizer, we all need to build back our inner biomes and resistance to disease; one simple way to do that is to put your hands back in the soil.

Paloma and Sean