A few snaps from my second visit to Fields Good Festival at the beautiful Glenarm Estate in Northern Ireland last week. The welcome was warm, the talks fascinating (especially the agroforestry one) and the late night, whisky-fuelled craic was ten on ten.

I spent days with some of the key players of the Irish and Northern Irish veg scene like the brilliant Lee Robb of Carrickfergus Greengrocers, set the world to rights with my our mate, Josiah from Hodmedods and got to spend a few hours with one of our lovely Northern Irish customers, Jonathon who is interested in exploring setting up a Northern Irish hub for us to supply into.

A wonderful couple of days and great to spend so much time with such well-informed and friendly folk.

Good afternoon everyone,

I hope you’ve all enjoyed your summers and managed to squeeze in a break or two from your daily grinds. The first week of September and the return of the kids to school marks the beginning of the winter rush for us and there was a notable uptick in the veg we shifted this week. You’ll be glad to hear that despite the especially dry summer, farm reports remain generally positive for the run in of the year and as well as more domestic lines returning to the list this week, we’re better covered by UK growers then we’ve ever been.

We’ve also a new brewery this week for you guys to toast in the autumn. I don’t know of a more forward thinking brewery than Stroud Brewery and I’m very pleased that after some discussions with their team, our Cathryn has managed to pull off adding them to our weekly lists. Not only are these guys very well attuned to all things environmental, their beers both look and more importantly, taste great. If you give them a try, you’ll see what I mean straight away. And while we have had some Stroud Brewery beers available to order on the list for a while already, we’re very excited to now be working with them directly – which can only mean one thing… cheaper beer.

As always, there’s plenty more going on behind the scenes our end too. I had a really encouraging meeting yesterday with Defra with my colleagues from the UK Fruit and Veg Coalition who are making some extremely positive noises about improving the access small-scale growers have to getting in on public sector contracts for our schools, hospitals and the like. For our work locally in this field, they see us as a key ally and we’re pleased to be able to help influence national government policy in this way.

On the back of the work we’re doing with schools, I was asked yesterday to present at an event organised in Jersey by some of our pals who we supply there each week…a great retailer called SCOOP. Feels like I’ve been living out of a bag most of this summer and I’ll be glad to get back into some routine but the guys in Jersey are really keen to better the food provisions in schools so away to Jersey I’m gonna go towards the end of the week. I’ll be sure to report back.

Weekly veg updates:

• Starting in the UK, Royal Oak has red Chinese cabbage, pointed savoy cabbage and fennel with tops while Newfields adds some golden beets, red beets, cauliflowers, purple cauliflowers and leeks.

• Elsewhere, New Farm has broccoli again and Chapel has some white cabbage, dirty carrots and leeks.

• Next up, Lynher has rainbow chard and perpetual spinach, Bagthorpe some acoustic potatoes and Shawhill are back on this list this week with their Casablanca spuddies.

• Farrington’s has baking potatoes and Roddy’s some cavolo Nero and butternut squash.

• Langton’s has some rainbow carrots this week as well as cauliflowers and red kohl rabi and Foskett’s some parsnips, watermelon radish and onion squash.

• Awen in Pembrokeshire has celery, little gem lettuce and mixed leaf salad.

• Flourish is back on the list this week with a full line up including mixed aubergines, thumbelina cucumbers, shishito peppers, sungold cherry tomatoes, loaads of varieties of basil, shiso and lavender.

• From our market gardens, A G Harvest has some Lord Derby cooking apples.

• And for our Wednesday customers, Sheffield Organic Growers has some green kale, mixed leaf salad and perpetual spinach.

• On the UK fruit front, Oakwood has some Bramley apples, Santana apples, Concorde pears and invincible pears and Carey has some pirouette apples.

• Elsewhere, Pardoe also has some conference pears and tophit plums.

• From Spain, Bioalgarrobo has castellano tomatoes and aubergines, Bioandalusi has some okitsu mandarins, Ecosur some cucumbers, juicing cucumbers and red peppers and Be Org some star ruby grapefruits.

• From Holland, Zann has some romanesco cauliflowers, sweet potatoes, kiwi berries and mandarin satsumas.

• From France, we have some elstar apples from Uni-Vert and some figs, grapefruit, limes and pomegranates from Bio & Bio.

• Our top picks from Dynamis are the red borlotti beans, flat red lettuce, black radish, Canada grise apples, sorrel and dried walnuts.

• To line your pantry’s, we’re getting a fresh delivery of Morgiel this week stocking up on briney gherkins and all of their honeys and we’re also getting more pear and cinnamon jam, raspberry jam and rhubarb marmalade from Hembridge.

• Lastly, Brown Cow has some new lines on this week. Everything we have listed from them is already is extremely popular so we imagine these will be too!
  • Lemon Greek Style Yogurt in glass jars
  • Lemon Kefir in glass bottles
  • Natural Kefir in glass bottles

I’ll sign off this week with a link to a presentation that was given to me last week from a group of masters students we’ve been working with this summer from Manchester Met Uni. The work they undertook was summat called a lifecycle analysis of a kilo of tomatoes. In short, using both primary data from ourselves and some of our growers and secondary data too (over 100 peer-reviewed journal papers), the guys compared the environmental impact of different methods of tomato production (glass house, poly tunnel outdoor, gas/wood/bio fuel powered etc) in the countries that we are supplied by. There was some really interesting results produced.

Have a top week,
Sean, Mads, Alph, Ell, Cathryn and Team ON x

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