Photo by Gumption via Creative Commons
Ginger and I, like many of the bloggers here at SYE, are committed to trying to minimize the environmental impact of our wedding. We are doing this in a variety of ways from picking a central location so fewer guests will have to drive to using recycled paper for our invitations. Sometimes the solution is spending more, and that can be difficult to swallow. I’m looking at you organic dinner and fair trade coffee. Buying seasonal, local food and flowers means you have to accept variability and limited choices. For example, I thought a tight bunch of white carnations would make for a modern and inexpensive centerpiece. But uh, I didn’t realize carnations aren’t grown in Maryland. Instead, we will use pretty spring flowers like ranunculus, anemones, tulips, and lilies. Some of the best eco friendly wedding ideas are all about creativity. Erica’s firefly bottle centerpiece vases are really inspiring me right now! To offset the premium we are paying for some of our eco friendly wedding choices I am trying to take advantage of some of the more budget friendly things we can do. I’m planning to buy vintage cake plates on EBAY instead of brand new ones for our cake buffet. To minimize waste, I asked our caterer to serve water in pitchers instead of bottles at the bar. Simple flowers from our florist ended up being significantly less expensive then what I was quoted by florists that didn’t restrict their buying to local farms. Which was a nice relief after looking at the price tag for food. We decided to skip favors entirely. I thought about doing a charity favor, but decided against it. We will donate to charity in honor of our wedding but I don’t want to specifically do this as a favor to our guests. When I get nervous about this decision because HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE FAVORS!?!, I read this to remind myself it’s ok. Also, no bathroom baskets or out of town bags. We are doing lots of things to be good hosts to our guests (like the day after brunch), and I just don’t think any wedding NEEDS this extra stuff.
I recently discovered The Green Bride Guide, and found it really helpful. The author, Kate Harrison, organizes all of her eco wedding ideas by topic and highlights which are most budget friendly. It makes finding ways to save and be “green” really easy. Definitely recommend it.
Yay for getting locally grown flowers! That’s awesome. Not to mention that they sound like they’ll look absolutely beautiful!
And I’m totally in *favor* (he he) of no favors!
Congratulations to you and Ginger on your engagement and your decision to have an eco-friendly wedding!
Of course, it’s your wedding, and you should do things that please the two of you and not other people, but if you’re passing on favors for environmental reasons, you might want to think about tree seedlings or other items that can be planted and create a lifetime of memories. It’s even suggested in The Green Bride Guide!
The local flowers sound like a trade up. It seems like going local makes everything tastier/prettier.