Many of you will know about our break in last week. The third time we have been targeted. This makes us very cross and is a real insult to the good work that we do. We are very sorry that several of the boxes last week were packed wrongly but we had a nightmare of a week and had a new volunteer helping us in the veg room. Hopefully this week we are all back to normal. Don’t forget if you had anything not up to standard or missing from your box, then do let us know and we will give you a replacement for free the following week. We offer a quality guarantee with all our boxes.

Out on the landscape we have been busy chopping and bagging logs. We sell them for £4 a potato sack full.

Also we have been busy planting out seeds and moving seedlings into pots ready for planting out as the weather warms. We have some really interesting looking veg for the summer, today for example one of our volunteers was planting sweet chocolate pepper seeds!

This is the week of the increase in price of the small boxes to £6. Thanks for the messages of support and understanding. Our price still remain very competitive, the £6 veg box this week would have cost you £6.60 from leading supermarkets when compared with equivalent veg.

Last week we took delivery of British Baked Beans! These are from a company in Norfolk and make use of Fava beans. They are very tasty and buying them supports British Farmers and help our social enterprise project survive. Hodmedod, the company producing them, are also looking at growing Quinoa and producing a range of other products. We sell not only thier baked beans in a rich tomato sauce, but also plain and dried beans and peas and a lovely Dhal. Order with your veg box to give them a try.

Thanks, Sean, Kylie and the Veg box team.

SPECIAL OFFER!!!! RECOMMEND A FRIEND TO SIGN UP FOR A REGULAR DELIVERY IN FEB AND RECEIVE A FREE GIFT IN YOUR VEG BOX! THANKS

So this week is the LAST week for the £5 boxes they go up to £6 next delivery. Amazing how quickly January has gone, did many of you keep to your new years resolutions. We know at least one customer that tried out VEGANUARY and kept to a very healthy vegan diet for a month. Now that is a bit much for a lot of people, but obviously eating lots of veg and less meat is a far healthier way to live.

We hope you enjoy the purple sprouting broccoli, we are currently chatting to a grower over near Epworth who grows organic white sprouting broccoli, fingers crossed we can economically get some of that! The potatoes this week are Victoria and make super roast potatoes. The Caulis are Lincolnshire grown and from Boston this week.

I managed to make the recipe from last week and it was lovely. The pear and celariac really worked well together, I was a bit surprised. I turn this week to a recipe from the Guardian and Hugh FW.

Out on the landscape the dreary wet days make for hard work so we have turned to getting the fruit poly tunnel ready. This year we are planting Guava and have fitted a simple irrigation system using old hose pipes, kindly donated. Inside we have also started propagating some seedlings, peppers, chillies and a few other early starters. Elsewhere we have been conditioning the soil by adding in manure and compost, getting ready for the growing season.

Last week we took delivery of a couple of new ranges of food, don’t for get you can order with your veg box or pop out to the van. Every £1 you spend with us stays in the community longer and help our charitable community work. We have a number of organic, healthy alternative products as well vegan, vegetarian and gluten free foods. We also sell fluoride free toothpaste and environmentally friendly toiletries and cleaning products.

Last week I mentioned that we need to get another 20 customers to meet our targets. I am particularly interested to hear from anyone that thinks their place of work might let us deliver a few boxes as this is a real winner from the point of view of efficiency and reducing food miles.

Thanks, Sean, Kylie and the Veg box team.

I don‘t know if you find that when you have been away for awhile it takes a while to get back into the swing of things? Certainly it felt manic here last week. We ran out of parsnips for the Friday boxes so had to swap them for calabrese (Broccoli), if this happened to you hopefully you didn’t mind! With the nature of our work this happens sometimes as we don‘t quite harvest as much as we hoped or we get to one of our suppliers/farmers and they just dont have enough of a particular crop, its just the nature of small scale production. Thankfully we have lovely understanding customers!

The frosty morning today made the land glisten. The silver sheen somehow makes the landscape look different. The leeks will be a bit sweeter and some of the bugs and pests will be killed off, helping to bring harmony to the ebb and flow of the cycle of life.

In the £10 box this week we have given customers spring onions and radishes that we have been carefully growing in our poly-tunnel; savour them, as we only managed to grow a few! We also have a few interesting winter leafy salad bits; the first to be ready is an interestingly flavoured and slightly peppery land cress. You can order a bag for 75p as an extra with your veg box. (again only limited supplies) We also have a few fresh Bolivian rainbow/Burning Ember chillies £1 a bag if you want a bit of warming up!

Some of you may know that in the storms of December one of our poly tunnels was destroyed by the wind, ripping off the poly cover and flapping it about like an old flag. I am pleased to tell you that the kind souls at the YMCA have funded the £500 needed to buy a new cover. We will be replacing it as soon as we get some warm weather in March.

If I can ask you to get your thinking caps on as we are going to do a big push to get an extra 20 customers in February. For the last 18 Months we have been funded by the National Lottery Local Food Grants and they want us to work with more people. I will remind you again but this is just a quick heads up! I’ve not had chance to try the recipe but it sounded very interesting!

Veg Box News 13.01.14

Happy new year & greetings from your 1st vegbox news of 2014. Can we first of all thank all the lovely customers that ordered our special Xmas box. We had more orders than last year & the feedback has been very positive.

So our winter boxes being filled with seasonal veg always seem sadly lacking in much variety, but in our efforts of keeping to seasonal and British produce we have to give you what fits this description. As we make more contacts with other growers then we hope to be able to find a couple of other veg that we can include. Sometimes the lack of veg or when we can’t get produce of good enough quality, it means we have to go further afield but where ever possible we provide you with our own grown or UK grown produce. This is why our veg keeps so well, the time from farm to fork is far shorter than the supermarkets usually offer.

After much deliberation and following feedback from some of our customers we have taken the difficult decision to increase the price of the £5 veg box to £6. This is our first price increase in 3 years. THIS TAKES EFFECT FROM THE 1ST OF FEBRUARY. The additional cost is due the increase in veg prices. So far we have dealt with increases by reducing our profit and reducing the amount we put in the box. Some weeks this has meant that we (and some of our customers) haven’t been happy with the amount of veg in the box. Having the box at £5 reduces the range of veg we can offer you. The increase to £6 brings the cost in line with other box schemes. The prices per kilo are staying the same, so you are still getting very good value for money, it is just the individual price of the box is having to be increased to give more flexibility with the contents.  We hope you understand our thinking and are still able to support us. Obviously if you call on site to collect the box then the price will be £5.50 (as each box has a 50p delivery charge). 

On site last week some of you may have seen the wassail ceremony conducted by the Grimsby Morris-men. There was the performance of a traditional plough play and plenty of singing and dancing. It was a great day and the Apple Trees of Lincolnshire can feel rightly blessed. We served up some rather tasty soup and it was lovely to have so many visitors on site.

Thanks, Sean, Kylie and the Veg box team.