Strawberry Time!

Hello everyone, 

Bob and I hope you are all very well and happy that the sun is out with a much warmer daytime temperature. The suntan lotion is being used and shorts are being worn down on the farm. Hooray! 

It is also time for fruit and vegetables of the spring/summer variety. Our leaves and lettuces are really popular, great to put in sarnies as well as salads.

The spring onions are very flavoursome, the white Musona onions tend to make me cry, sorry if they do the same to you, but they are sooo good. We have some smaller ones available, for pickling or using whole during cooking (saves all that crying).

We are delighted with our beans…with an array of different beans growing in the tunnels, more will be ready soon.  The peas and sugar snap peas will be ready in the next few weeks, and if the flowers are anything to go by, we will have such a lot! The shallots and garlic will be ready for harvest at the beginning of July.

The brassicas are bursting from the mini outdoor tunnels, (which are used for protection from those pesky pigeons, who are still hanging around in hope of a leafy meal),and should all be ready, soon, to. The kale is the first of the new summer brassicas to be ready. Our new crop of kohlrabi is great for eating raw in salads and slaws. 

Bob hopes you tried his recipe (promise it was all his own work). For those who received radish last week, you will totally understand. He even wrote and printed the recipe as well as "cheffing" in our kitchen. 

So, there are sooooo many more summer veggies coming onto the website. But, what we have been waiting for has arrived! During March, this year, we planted out a thousand strawberry plants. They grew, produced flowers and the fruit has arrived. We know we will not have an absolute bumper crop as the plants are young. But, my goodness, what strawberries we have, they taste divine. Place your orders early for these as we will only have a certain amount, to harvest, each week, especially in our first week of harvesting. We hope to be able to satisfy all orders, but please try not to each buy many punnets all at once. We will have strawbs for a few weeks…it will be good to share. They will be in cardboard punnets which can be recycled. Enjoy while the strawberry season lasts.

The next fruit we will have will be the gooseberry. We have had a gooseberry sawfly issue. At the beginning of the growing season for the gooseberry, the saw fly began eating the plant. They demolish the leaves over night. We bought in some nematodes, placed them in water and sprayed the mixture onto the gooseberry bushes. It worked straight away and the bushes were saved. However, they have come back and have been eating the leaves, not the fruit thankfully. We will get more nematodes to work their magic. It is amazing what you can buy on the tinternet!

The sweetcorn has been planted out as have leeks and more onions. Everywhere is being given lots of water to drink and the the summer season crops have been fed regularly. We have water butts ready with a concoction of seaweed extract and water. All the plants enjoy a good soaking of feed every other week. The feed absolutely hums! The heat we have been having has made the liquid smell even stronger as it warms in the butt. As long as it does the job we will suffer the smell. 

Many of you must be enjoying our freshly picked herbs. They tend to be the last crop we harvest before Bob sets off on his delivery route. You are buying loads and loads. Must mean that you are all cheffing, just like our ‘delivery boy’, Bob. That is great news. The herbs will keep for a while, especially if you place them in a jug of water. 

Enjoy your cooking and eating with our Fresh Local Organic Produce.

Till next week,

 Ann👩‍🌾

PS. We will be closing the shop when we reach our capacity. We are becoming extremely busy and we do want to provide a much better service to you all. But when we are full we are full! As we keep saying…we want to be better not bigger.