Our Story

The inspiration

Our story began one spring Cornish morning whilst sitting and sipping a cup of tea with a retired local farmer. I was completely blown away that I was actually talking to someone, that had been a first responder and lived through the Exxon Oil Spill of 1989, a catastrophe that had been one of my final year presentations at uni. Listening to everything that unfolded on the local beaches within our community, was nothing like the information that I had gathered for my uni presentation; taking the tractor down to the beach,
wearing overalls, gloves and masks, being covered in oil. Clearing the oil that washed up, the seaweed, marine life. Trying to rescue and keep the birds alive. So much destruction and marine life lost. All of it was incredible to listen to, but it was the way the farmer spoke about everyone coming together and the fact there was nothing else for it…you simply had to stop working and go protect the environment, that had me captivated.

The founding

Our conversation didn’t finish there, the land in which his farm and home was placed, was surrounded by a huge volume of trees, so many that they are easily recognisable and shape the familiar coastline of our local shores we love and protect. I asked the farmer about the trees, and with the same tone he used to talk about responding to the oil spill on his tractor, he said I planted them all. Over 1000 trees, in the 60+ years I have lived on this land. Outside his home, you can see tiny little saplings growing on, in rotation ready to be planted amongst the woodland he’d nurtured all these years.

We then somehow turned to the subject of seaweed and how seaweed had been used on his farm for many years and how nutritious it was as a natural fertiliser, but now the chemical fertilisers had long since replaced the use of natural seaweed. I remember thinking, if seaweed was so good back then, why isn’t it still used today? I didn’t realise it then, but this conversation shaped the start of Little Green Seaweed.

As a young family, with a water-loving toddler we wild harvest natural seaweed, using only sustainable methods, putting the environment and our local ecosystems before profit. No fossil fuels (except for transport to our harvesting site) or electricity are used in the harvesting and processing of our seaweed, everything is done by hand, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

Our commitment to the environment and coastal ecosystems is really important to us and we have the Organic Soil Association Verification which you can read more about here. We are also working with the B Changemakers to become B Corp certified later this year, another commitment to not only looking out for our environment but ensuring that sustainability and the environment is prioritised across all areas of our business.

The core values

Our values and goals at Little Green Seaweed are to help provide alternatives to chemical toxins being used on our soil (be it in our gardens or in green spaces) and to help our community have more sustainable lifestyle choices.

We want to work and collaborate with other like-minded organisations and professionals to protect our local shores and ecosystems for our daughter’s generations and future generations to come, including participating in research and citizen science projects.

Our lives in our coastal village is entwined and enriched by our community and we want to give back by providing our community with natural, organic solutions with our products and to also help others in our community to live sustainably, building a circular economy and refill movement.

Meet Our Family And Crew

The impact

And not only that, linking everything back to the original conversation that started it all, we have just partnered with Plant One CIC a local Cornish charity that restores and manages woodlands across Cornwall. Our partnership will help their work restoring and planting trees and carrying our biodiversity assessments and EIA across their sites. For every bottle of liquid seaweed that is bought by our customers online, we will donate £1 of your money to the charity, and we are looking forward to joining them on one of their volunteer days later this year. This partnership is really important to us and we are excited to see what support the Little Green Seaweed community can give this season.

Our community work doesn’t stop there, we are working with a local community farm to help look at the ways in which we can use seaweed as a natural fertiliser to increase the quality of the soil cycle in fields growing root vegetables, with the help of soil analysis from the team at Symbiosis Soil.

Meet the team

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