From little things....

They sure don't look like much now, but your looking at a forest in the making. We just took delivery of these sturdy little Tasmanian bluegums, now just got to get to work planting. The site prep has been done, grass removed etc, now we've got to make time to get them in to the ground, before spring hits. The Mongrel Socks team, in all seriousness want to turn our nude paddocks in to a forest. We are well on the way. We intend leaving a living, breathing Mongrel Sock legacy, so long after our sock making days are over, these tree's will still be giving back goodness.

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.