Dreaming of a Green Christmas?

Well, look no further than edibleculture! The enthusiastic team at this climate-conscious garden centre and nursery in Faversham have been working hard this autumn to provide you with a brilliant selection of eco-friendly and sustainable gifts for Christmas.

Their garden shop and greenhouses are full of exciting and unusual gifts that promise to be useful as well ethical. From locally produced foods through to the wide range of wildlife products, there is something here for everyone. For the gardening enthusiast in your life, they stock a marvellous range of tools, including some wonderful hand tools from specialist Japanese toolmaker Niwaki as well as a range of nature-friendly garden supplies and sundries.

Alongside some interesting and quirky rope based products made at the Ropery in the Historic Dockyard at Chatham, they also have gifts made of salvaged and recycled land and sea plastics such as the innovative muggis unspillable drinks trays and frost proof flower pots made from recycled fishing nets and crates.

They have a gorgeous range of stainless-steel lunch tins and drinking bottles by Elephant Box. These practical gifts look great, last a lifetime and help you save on plastic takeaway lunch packaging by bringing your own food to work.

This is, of course, the place to come for your locally grown Christmas trees. There is a selection of pot grown trees with their roots intact, so you can plant them up after Christmas and use them again next year. In the new year, you can return your tree to edibleculture who collect and send them to local zoos to enrich the lives of the animals there.

Chris Williams and David Ware, who co-own edibleculture, have been working to make their business not just carbon neutral, but regenerative. Not only are they plastic, peat and pesticide-free as a garden centre, their business is responsible for 3-4,000 trees a year being planted.

Edibleculture is located in the grounds of the Abbey School on the edge of Faversham, and everything they do and sell is carefully considered so they can minimise their impact on the environment as well as helping people to increase biodiversity in our gardens and neighbourhoods.

David says, “we research and choose our suppliers carefully. We care about each product we sell and the story behind it – whether they are locally produced or made from reclaimed or recycled materials, where they come from and how they can be disposed of really matters to us.”

So if you want to shop with a clear conscience this Christmas, come and pay edibleculture a visit. On Saturdays and Sundays, they host the little French coffee owned by Jacques et Lilie, where you can enjoy Faversham’s best coffee and home-made French patisseries while you do your Christmas shopping.