Awen Organics produce was looking tip-top yesterday👌🥬

From left to right, we’ve got their butterhead lettuce, bunched beetroot, fresh bunched shallots, and red frisée lettuce.

The good news? They’re all available to order for next week too! 💚

I’m trying to figure out why I’ve been ‘on one’ writing the weekly newsletter this morning and I think it’s because I resent how conflicting it always feels trying to celebrate small wins in the spectre of our ever-deepening climate crisis.

The baked and now charred moorlands that surround Manchester are still smouldering after being set ablaze more than a week ago, albeit unintentionally by some irresponsible kids lighting fireworks up there. The acrid reek of our nearby smoking peatlands has carried over to our warehouse the whole time and I can only imagine that this kind of thing is going to become more likely, the drier our droughted summers become.

Stuff like this very much takes the shine off the fact that as a result of more people wanting veg from us, we’ve had the pleasure of welcoming a raft of new small-scale growers to our weekly list of late. I remember way back when, when we’d be scratching around looking to turn up new certified organic growers but as we’re becoming more renowned to be a trusted route to market, increasingly, folk are approaching us. It feels a real privilege to be able to be in the position we’re in and in a small way, we’re demonstrating that we can play a small part in helping catalyse a positive reworking of our food and supply systems.

However, all our good work and plenty more besides can of course be wiped out with the flick of a politician’s wrist. As the great American folk singer Woody Guthrie once wrote, “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen” and with Burnham due to announce the reopening of oil and gas fields in the North Sea (formerly sold off by milk-robbing Mephistopheles herself, aka Thatcher in the 80s, meaning the UK will receive little to no benefit of doing so for the fuel going on to be sold on the BLOODY OPEN INTERNATIONAL MARKET), it’s enough to make some of us lot question are we just pissing in the wind?

The way I resolve this is by remembering that I/we didn’t cause the mess we’re in. Rather, it was thrust upon us. I remember my old pal from home in Blacon, Neil, who generally shared my outlook on life once questioning the path I was taking as a kid saying summat along the lines of “why do you bother though, mate- you’re not gonna win!?” I answered Neil saying that although it was very possible that we could fail in trying to generally make our surroundings a better place, personally I’m able to relish the world and all its contents much more fully knowing that i’m not willingly complicit in it’s destruction.

Me and some pals canoed off Anglesey on the weekend, catching our mackerel suppers and paddling to islands where a colony of seals basked in the sun after doing just the same. I couldn’t take the rare pleasure I get from those kinda things if I were at the same time looking to only exploit nature and all it holds. So though it’s tough and there’s plenty to do, stick in there, comrades!

A couple of updates on things that you rightly will care about more than my weekly ramblings…

• We will be keeping the Xmas Authentic Bread items on the price-list each week until mid August so customers can place pre-orders up until this date. We will be taking it off the list that we send out on Tuesday 18th August so we can collate all the orders and send them to Authentic Bread as they need to finalise their baking schedule & staffing by the end of August. The order will be delivered to us at the end of September so we will start to distribute at the beginning of October. We will collate everything each customer has ordered and get it out to them as one order so there is plenty of time to ensure sales. All goods will obviously have a shelf life that goes beyond Christmas.

• You may have had some tomatoes being cancelled recently from The Tomato Stall. Though obvs that’s not ideal, for some context, this has been to do with the prolonged periods of exceptionally high temps. In their entire history of growing tomatoes on the Isle of Wight, these guys have never experienced such a prolonged period of consistently high heat. Their growing teams are working hard to understand and navigate them and they’ve asked for your patience as they try to adapt to these unprecedented conditions.

For those interested in a fuller, more scientific explanation…”tomato plants perform best in consistently warm and stable conditions, with the right levels of water, nutrients and carbon dioxide. The plants naturally release water through their leaves, which helps to keep them cool and allows them to continue growing.

However, when temperatures become too high, the plants come under stress and begin to conserve water. This slows their ability to take in carbon dioxide, reduces photosynthesis and can temporarily pause fruit development. As a result, tomatoes can take longer to grow and ripen, creating variability in harvest volumes and availability. The prolonged heat also impacts the bumblebees that support crop pollination. During particularly hot periods, bee activity within the crop reduces as they focus on regulating the temperature of their hives, using wing movement to circulate air and protect the colony rather than foraging among the plants.

This is a completely natural response to the heat, but it temporarily reduces pollination levels across the crop. Combined with the stress placed on the plants themselves, this has led to greater inconsistency in fruit development, crop yields and availability. As elevated temperatures are forecast to continue, The Tom Stall anticipates supply pressures may continue in the short term while crop performance and pollination activity gradually recover. Consequently, availability may remain constrained for the next few weeks.

Over to my wonderful colleague, Ell for her full…

Weekly veg updates

• Starting in the UK, Newfields has rainbow chard, green and red kale, green and red batavia lettuce and Maris peer spuds.

• Next up, Lynher has some green beans, Roddy’s some beetroot and Sparta tomatoes and Strawberry Fields have their bunch golden beets and chioggia available again as well as some tromboncino squash.

• Haslum return again this week with aubs, cucumbers, short cucumbers, courgettes and cherry vine tomatoes and Terry has some spring onions and bagged coriander.

• From newcomer Hael we’ve some batavia lettuce, little gem, mixed heirloom tomatoes and mixed cherry tomatoes and from Awen some bunched red baby beets, romana courgettes and green kale.

• Flourish have added plenty to their offering this week so make sure to have a good peruse, our top picks are the sungold cherry tomatoes, lemon boy heirloom tomatoes, and Cherokee purple heirloom tomatoes.

• Middle Ground are back on the list this week with a full offering including beetroot, chard, courgettes, cucumbers, kale, potatoes, salad, spinach and loadsa herbs.

• From our market gardens, Trinity has some celery and courgettes and A G Harvest has green beans, mixed salad and spring onions.

• And for our Wednesday customers, Moss Valley has red beets with tops, cavolo Nero, Swiss chard, short cucs and a variety of lettuce and Growing Well have some bagged and loose cavolo Nero.

• On the UK fruit front, we’ve got a couple suppliers returning this week including Pardoe and Windmill who both have opal plums available. We’ve also got plenty of plums from Oakwood, Carey, and Augernik too.

• From Spain, Biovergel has butternut squash, piel de sapo melons, ercolini pears black watermelons and verdelli lemons, Camposeven some red Palermo peppers and Haciendas some ercolini pears.

• From Holland, Zann has some caulis, parsnips, shallots and both red and white arra grapes.

• From France, Uni-Vert has butternut squash, Hokkaido squash and black magic grapes and our top picks from Dynamis this week are red bananas, fifi bananas, green chillis, black zebra tomatoes, ribbed yellow tomatoes and black belgie watermelons.

• To line your pantry’s, we got raw forest honey available once more from Morgiel.

Alluding back to my waffling above, here’s a verse from GK Chesterton’s poem ‘The Secret People’…

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

We hope you have a wonderful week,

Sean, Ell, Alph, Cathryn and Team ON x

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