A local farm producing quality microgreens sustainably, Spring Hill Greens provides a fresh, flavorful, and nutritious produce option for Morning Fresh Dairy home delivery customers.
Starting in March of 2021, we teamed up with Spring Hill Greens, our neighborhood farm producing eco-friendly and fresh microgreens. This partnership worked out great for both of us. We were looking to grow our list of quality local products, and they needed people to try their greens- it was a great match!
Friends of the Environment
One of the main reasons we decided to partner with Spring Hill Greens was their commitment to following environmentally conscious practices and producing a quality product. In fact, Spring Hill Greens has some exciting, new, and sustainable greenhouse features. Owner, Jennifer, has shared they are making eco-friendly strides by implementing the following greenhouse enhancements.
“Greenhouses are very large users of energy. They are a beautiful, controlled environment to grow food in, but are very expensive because of all the heating and cooling equipment and associated costs of running and maintaining said equipment. That said,” Jennifer explains, “we are determined to reach the very high (and almost impossible) status of being carbon neutral food producers.” To meet this goal, they’ve started a solar panel project to generate energy sustainably. They even chose to use new solar technology called Agrivoltaics, in which bifacial panels act as “solar fences” to power their greenhouses.
Another sustainable practice in place is driven by the need to keep their greenhouse heated during the harsh, cold Colorado winters. They’ve implemented a biomass boiler to supply this heat. This boiler is fueled by “waste trees,” taken from local tree companies that would otherwise be taken to the landfill. This practice repurposes the trees, keeps them localized, and eliminates landfill dump fees. The boiler is extremely clean, and its emissions standards are higher than the cleanest burning wood stove.
Pesticide-Free Environment
Spring Hill Greens follows strict greenhouse sanitation measures to ensure plants are grown in a healthy and nutritious manner, pesticide free. This is an ambitious task to uphold, as creating a pesticide-free, enclosed greenhouse environment is much more difficult to attain than creating an organically produced environment, as organic production allows for the use of pesticides.
What IS a microgreen?
A microgreen is any plant that has germinated, and therefore still has the cotyledons attached. The cotyledons are prepackaged embryonic leaves tucked into the seed and attached to the embryo. These cotyledons have stored starches and nutrients for the seedling to use as it searches for sunlight. Consuming the cotyledons offers a different nutritional profile than a mature plant, making it a great option for trying to consume different nutrients.
What is Spring Hill Greens’ most popular product?
Spring Hill Greens offers a wide array of salad mixes, which are a hit among Morning Fresh Home Delivery customers and one of their most popular products! The salad mixes offer a familiar way to eat microgreens, since microgreens are “somewhat newer to the produce marketplace,” according to Jennifer. Their “Bowl Me Over” mix is great for topping any bowled meal or Asian dish, with a blend of baby basil, baby cilantro, micro daikon, and micro-onion. Another favorite, with baby cilantro, micro radish, baby chive, and sunflower shoots, the “Nacho Typical Taco” mix is great for topping Mexican dishes with. She mentions that people say their salad mixes have “upleveled everything from sandwiches to eggs to quesadillas to take out.”
What is the Grazin’ Greens blend?
A Morning Fresh Dairy exclusive, the Grazin’ Greens blend is a seasonal mix available to Morning Fresh Dairy customers, offering a fresh variety of greens for each season. The Fall edition offers customers a zesty mix of spicy microgreens, micro celery and pea shoots, while the Spring edition offers a fresh mix of micro chrysanthemum, sunflower shoots, and edible flowers!
Morning Fresh Dairy is proud to offer products from local companies like Spring Hill Greens to provide our customers with the best. We are always expanding our product list so that our customers have variety, convenience, and knowledge that they are supporting the local community and local businesses.
