Weekly Update: Welcome Back Farmers & Goodbye Mary!

3rd February 2014

He’s a month later than usual but it’s so good to see Kane from Busch Organics back this year delivering his summer corn, beans, purple and orange carrots to the Fair Food warehouse. It’s also great to have apples back from Hazeldean Forest Farm. Madeline’s garlic from Blue Sky Organics, Joe Valente’s cherry tomatoes and more corn from Captains Creek Organics as well. After the recent heat it’s easy to forget we had a really cold start to summer pushing back harvest dates for local apples, corn, tomatoes, capsicums, cucumbers and we still haven’t really seen eggplants yet.

It’s been a very, very odd season; produce hasn’t ripened because of the early cold and has then been cooked in the field with the unprecedented heat wave. In my 12 years sourcing produce I haven’t seen a summer as reliably unreliable as this one. For the first time in my memory there have been weeks when staples like organic potatoes and carrots have just not been available. Permaculture co-founder, Bill Mollison, would call it “global weirding” as opposed to global warming.

The outcome for everyone has been uncertainty; one day black berries are available the next they’re not, one week there’s an over-supply of baby spinach the next it’s been cooked in the field. That said we’re doing our best in this topsy-turvey season to supply all your custom orders and substitute produce into our set boxes. But if you do miss out on a treasured punnet of strawberries or a simple bunch of rainbow chard just keep in mind that for many of our farmers the summer harvest is just beginning which means for the rest of us things will only get better from here.

Read on…