The Lodge that Grows Their Own Food

11 Oct

Sustainability: The ability to maintain or support a process continuously over time.

This includes both commercially and environmentally sustainable.

As a remote lodge, we have always wanted to be as sustainable as possible. It makes sense from a business cost-saving point of view, as well as from an environmental-friendly, reducing carbon footprint point of view.

Back in 2023 when we just opened our doors, we set up a large Vegepod to start growing some vegetables and herbs for our restaurant. But we knew we needed something bigger to make a real impact.

Being remote, we face TWO big challenges:

1. Food services won’t deliver to us, not without a dear surcharge each time.

2. We are not within the Council’s rubbish and recycling collection services area.

To tackle the first issue, we always plan food runs with other tasks, so we can be smart with our limited manpower, carbon footprint, and time. We have also been actively working with local suppliers, hoping to reduce the travel distance and source the freshest ingredients wherever we can.

Our lodge manager Aaron has also started Project Greenhouse, building a reasonably sized Greenhouse to grow our food to serve our restaurant. It has not been an easy project with our small team, limited hours in a day, very strong Westlies throughout Winter and missing parts that took months to arrive, but the greenhouse is closed in! Furthermore, Aaron and the team also built the planter boxes themselves!

Our new Head Chef Franz Meiselbach is also very keen to get his hands dirty. He is eager to research, grow and transform the produce from our greenhouse into delicate fine-dining cuisines for our guests to enjoy and savour.

We took our second challenge as an opportunity to reduce waste. Firstly we established a monthly pickup schedule with Green Garrilla to pick up our landfill and recyclables. But our key solution is to set up our own composting system with Carbon Cycle. The chic-looking, pest-proof system matches the architectural design of the lodge perfectly. Our three-box systems mean we can streamline the compost-producing process, returning carbon back to the soil, which will help with the growth of our produce and native tree planting.