Week 13: What's happening
Hope everyone has been enjoying this beautiful sunshine. It's brilliant seeing all the green buds and shoots...Spring never ceases to amaze. The crazy winds weren't very helpful - meant we had to do emergency repairs to polytunnel - and know the warmth isn't here to stay but it's still good to have a taste of it.
In the field we've got a leek experiment going on plus trying to stay on top of weeding (and maybe snacking on a few of those lovely radishes)....more here on what we've been up to.
There's a lovely video here from one of our suppliers, Strawberry Fields, worth a watch to get an idea of some of the characters and stories behind the veg in your boxes.
We know that lots of you like the fact our veg boxes have minimal packaging. We do still have packaging waste though and it's something that we aim to keep to a minimum but don't always have much control over, although we also try to reuse where possible too. We're happy tonight though as we've worked out that we've got 8 weeks worth of non-recyclable (black bin) rubbish into a normal-sized bin...and that's from over 900 veg boxes (that's 900 families/homes)!!! Can always do better but this feels like a win! (we do have a monthly black bin collection, we just missed the last one hence the need to fit 2 month's rubbish into one bin).
Eat Your Greens veg boxes:
Carrots aren't great, and probably won't be now for next weeks - we'll be putting less in until we get the new UK carrots. The oranges are clementules! - quite sharp, not sweet like the Christmas clementines. Kohlrabi and purple sprouting broccoli in the small boxes this week. Hoping to have purple sprouting broccoli in the regular boxes next week if all goes to plan.
The Vale Grocer shop: OPEN THURSDAY (1st) not Friday this week
Plenty of: potatoes, onions, leeks, ginger, garlic, green palermo peppers, small Tundra cabbages, courgettes
Limited: kohlrabi, red palermo peppers, cauliflowers, purple sprouting broccoli, radishes, salad leaves, aubergines
Fruit: oranges, lemons, Royal Gala UK apples
We were meant to have tomatoes but Chris is currently kicking himself after giving away 10kg of tomatoes in the boxes because he mis-typed weights on the packing sheet - so Monday and Wednesday boxes got extra tomatoes and there are none left for the shop, sorry!
We're running low on Cae Main apple juice now, maybe a few bottles left if we can get our hands on them...then that's it until later in the year for Cae Main. We've ordered some more from Herefordshire so we'll still have juice if you'd like some.
Recipes:
Sorry, limited time to source recipes this week but highly recommend this vegetarian chilli recipe - it's really good. Also this apple and kohlrabi salad looks great although have to admit I haven't tried it.
have a good week