23rd & 24th August Newsletter

Whenever we bump into our box customers out and about, almost without exception, they say "we can’t wait for the tomatoes….", well, at long last, everyone’s patience is about to be rewarded! This week, please find in your boxes samples of the Heritage Pink and yellow Brandywine tomatoes. These have a fabulous juicy flavour and are exceptionally good with a tasty cheese. They are also great for cooking, so can’t go wrong with them really. The sheer size of some of these fruits means that the box is rather tomato dominated this week, but they also all tend to come at once and we thought that you’d rather have them whilst available than be rationed with them. You won’t get this many of them this season again. Enjoy! As long-standing customers will know, the downside of these tomatoes (and probably why they just aren’t grown commercially) is that they split very easily as they ripen and they also bruise easily, so handle with care, and do understand that if you have a split along the base of yours, it’s not a grade-out.

Whilst on the subject of grade-outs, back to the "Amorosa" potato variety which we were discussing last week. This is very similar in appearance to the "Red Duke of York", but is more carmine coloured and smoother skinned. It is pretty much an all rounder in terms of cooking qualities, so steam, bake or mash and also use as salad if you want. However, as said last week, some of these are hollow and blackened in the middle, but this is undetectable from the outside. We have put extra potatoes in the box to compensate, but if you get an unacceptable proportion which are unusable, then please do let us know so we can replace them for you next week. The hollowing varies from a small area to almost the whole inside of the potato. Because of this problem, we recommend that you cut them in half before cooking. If anyone thinks they discover a means of telling which ones are affected, then do let us know, we’d be very grateful. Each year we seem to try growing at least one new variety which then gets this problem, so thanks for your patience with this.

Aubergines – a blip in fruit set, so not all boxes have had these yet, but many small ones on the plants. Peppers coming too, and sweetcorn, which we are currently fencing off from the badgers…..

The Plymouth Flavour Fest last weekend was a bit miserable weatherwise, Saturday being very drizzly and Sunday being so windy that at one point all the signs in the stall got blown away. Very autumnal. Where is the summer – not sure that a couple of days of sun really counts actually!? We continue to pick up the onion crop, which we may even get into the barn during a dry spell if we’re lucky, but it’s still soggy from it’s drenching at the beginning of the week. The weeds in the brassica crops are now so large, that the only means of getting them out will be pulling by hand. Seems to be plenty of milk thistle and fat hen towering over the earlier planted ones, although some of the later ones we did manage to weed mechanically with the tractor and they are not so bad.

Now what the weather has made inevitable this season: we have decided we need to put our box prices up by 5% as of the first box of September. This will make the small box £8.40, medium £10.50 and large £12.60. Still very reasonable when compared to any other outlet, be it box scheme or supermarket and we are still probably the only outlet in the UK which genuinely grows everything ourselves. It was rather disheartening at the Plymouth Flavour Fest to have competition from two vegetable wholesalers this year (not producers) and for visitors to our stall to ask us, despite the signs everywhere saying 100% home grown, where we bought our produce from. Home grown seems to have been diluted to just mean grown in the UK, so we need to look for alternative descriptions to get the message across that we grow it all ourselves, as it does entail an awful lot of extra work and risk and really should command a premium far greater than the price we charge. Any comments/suggestions/feedback gratefully received.

At the same time the expression "locally sourced" has now also been diluted to include meaning sourced from a local wholesaler, irrespective of where they actually import from. Please always push the point when eating out, as it’s quite shocking what people are getting away with when you REALLY start to question them and persist in doing so without accepting being fobbed off with the now ubiquitous term "locally sourced". At this point we should say that yes, Sarah at the Rose and Crown in Sandford really does get our veg – you can tell by the carrots!

Anyway, enough ranting, enjoy your vegetables and the sunshine…..All the best, Phil, Helen, Tom, David and James and team.

Extras: pots £1.35/kg, 2kgs £2.50, 10kgs £8. Red pots (not Amorosa) £1.75/kg bunch carrots £1.20/500g £2.30/kg, onion £1.50/kg, basil 65p/25g, parsley 65p/50g, chard £1/220g. These prices for box customers. Hopefully, a wider range of extras available shortly.