Growing Socks

Being humble Tasmanian sock makers, making our ever so humble Mongrel Socks, without delusions of grandeur. It’s a bit hard to harbour pretensions in the cold, hard light of the work shop. What you see is what you get, and what you do is what you’ve done. We not only aspire to make a humble living, we also aspire to do things right. Right for us, right for our customers and right for the world around us.
I’ve written before about our tree planting program, endeavouring to offset our carbon footprint-that’s all good. It’s something we’re proud of. We’ve now got hundreds of trees planted, and they’re thriving. It’s all well and good to plant a few trees, but what really counts is that they survive. It’s only in those future” growing” years that our local environment will reap the benefits of neutralizing our carbon emissions. This doesn’t just happen; it takes care and attention, and a bit of elbow grease. It is hard work manually planting trees. Back breaking, and self satisfying work, and that’s only the beginning. To give our tree’s the best chance possible chance of survival, we need to mulch and water regularly in the early days, and keep a watch on rainfall later, to see that get what they need to thrive, and thru summer-survive. We have rain water collection, with lots of storage, and try not to be frivolous with it. Plenty of water means plenty of weeds, so they have to be dealt with. I suppose we could go the nuke method, but hey, we don’t really want to work with toxic chemicals if we can avoid it. So, elbows again, pulling the weeds requiring attention 2-3 times a year. It’s do-able.
So, as the years roll by, our tree’s get bigger, the native creatures flourish, we’ve got tangible evidence that our crack at environmental responsibility has not been a waste of time. If we can do it, anyone can.