Photos courtesy of Love & Carrots
During a month littered with love, we wanted to share a love story between local businesses, Compost Crew and Love & Carrots!
Love & Carrots designs, builds, and maintains vegetable gardens and sustainable edible landscapes for clients across the DMV area. They also provide garden coaching and guidance for home growers who need a helping hand, maintaining about 150 gardens with their team of farmers, and have installed over 2,000 gardens since their founding!
The founder of this LBGTQ+ and woman-owned business, Meredith Sheperd, started Love & Carrots in 2011. Meredith grew up on a farm in Vermont, later working on farms internationally. After a friend of hers asked for some gardening help, Meredith realized there was a huge need and untapped potential for business. Sure, there were other landscapers, but not many that helped with vegetable gardening and edible landscaping!
The team has found that while people like the idea of gardening, many often aren’t sure how and where to start. Love & Carrots helps their clients find opportunities to grow, whether in their backyard or on the rooftop of a commercial building. Their design team provides creative solutions for how to use these spaces, and their installation crew brings them to life.
Sustainable, water-smart landscaping that is naturally amended and ecosystem-friendly are just a few aspects of an ideal garden. Compost is an essential ingredient in this process. Using Compost Crew’s Farm Feast compost, which is made with locally-sourced food scraps, hay, wood chips and leaves, is perfect for potted plants and landscaping and also safe for vegetable beds and gardens, so it was love at first sight when Love & Carrots met Compost Crew at an event in DC.
It’s always great to find another source of high quality compost, and we are very excited to partner with Compost Crew. We love supporting other local businesses who provide a quality product that we simply can’t garden without! – Maddy Belin, Accounts & Communications Manager
Recently, Love & Carrots placed a massive order for Farm Feast compost in bulk. For months, the company has been receiving 20 cubic yards per delivery to use in every garden as the team prepares their customers’ gardens for the spring. These spring prep visits consist of refreshing the soil to make sure the garden beds are full of nutrients and ready for the season ahead. Maddy says this process is labor intensive, and having the compost delivered from a local vendor takes a load off of the team’s shoulders.
Love & Carrots has received the DC Mayor’s Sustainability Award, the Green America Award, and was named one of Business Insider’s Top 50 ‘Coolest’ Businesses in America. Love & Carrots staff use their on-site community garden to experiment with different soil amendments, types and amounts of compost, and grow tons of new and exciting varieties of crops. Staff often exchange recipes with each other and clients, making things like hot sauce and kimchi to share!
The Love & Carrots team incorporates education with its service through their biweekly garden coaching services, where a farmer works alongside the client, teaching as they go. Learning about compost and how it can improve soil health is a part of many lessons – they appreciate being able to use Farm Feast as a great example of what compost should be.
Matching their love growing vegetables with our love of compost has been the perfect pear.
