Sustainability

As well as producing the best quality herbs all year round, we're always searching for innovations that minimise our environmental impact to make us a more sustainable business.

Rainwater Harvesting

Lincolnshire Herbs was specifically built with economic water consumption in mind. Irrigation water is never put back into the ground, we recycle every drop. Our herbs drink a lot of water and none of it comes from the main water supply. 95% of our water is collected from the roof and is stored in our reservoir. This is called rainwater harvesting, Rainwater harvesting is increasingly common but it does planned into new buildings as its difficult do implement with existing structures. Lincolnshire Herbs were one of the first glasshouse companies to use rainwater harvesting back in 1998. Unfortunately, Lincolnshire is getting drier so we have recently installed a bore hole and we pump water into our reservoir when required. The water that doesn’t get used is cleaned by our specially designed filtering system and re-used. So we literally use and re-use every drop of rain!

Growing without Pesticides

• We don’t use pesticides, fungicides or herbicides within our glasshouse. We use practical and innovative techniques that have been developed by our team.
• We use biological predators that feed on other pests – we call this bio control. We buy bio control in packets and bottles every week where we place them throughout the crop
• We use mechanical control with the plant ticklers.
• We plant chives within the parsley crop because aphids don’t like the smell of chives (and other plants such as garlic). So simple but effective. Try it at home!
• We keep clean! Keeping the environment around the plants clean is really key. We steam clean our growing gutters before they are reused reducing the risk of disease.

Striving for sustainable composts

Lincolnshire Herbs is committed to finding a sustainable alternative to using peat. The key word is ‘sustainable’. You can grow herbs without peat but the alternatives aren’t really sustainable, for example, shipping coco husks from the Caribbean. At the moment there are no alternatives that grow crops to the high standards that peat does. Lincolnshire Herbs are involved in a project to manufacture a peat alternative using sustainable waste streams. Partners in this project include the Institute of Food Research (Norwich), HDC, Del Monte, Bulrush, ASDA, Farplants and Organic Recycling (Spalding). After 10 years of research we still have a way to go before we can truly say we have found a sustainable, cost effective alternative to peat. Currently, we are using a peat reduced mix, which incorporates green waste.