The UK list may be slowing down as we await the new season, but our European farms are bringing some very welcome colour into the warehouse 🌈

We listed beautiful salad punnets with edible flowers from JWE last week – and they absolutely did not disappoint… almost too pretty to eat 🌸🌼

This week we’ve also had stunning mixed-colour cherry tomatoes from Dynamis, alongside crisp white, purple and red radishes from Vasco. It might not quite be salad weather yet, but when the veg looks this good, we can’t help dreaming about all the incredible salad bowls on the horizon 🤩

Good afternoon everyone,

Busy, busy, busy, this end as per with work going on on so many fronts just now.

As domestic lines begin to thin out on the list, our Maddy and Cathryn have been busy contacting growers that we’re blessed to be able to lean on for emergency roots, tubers and greens. Thankfully they’ve had some success so helping stretch out our beetroot, carrot, kale and spring greens season this week are Mahollam Farm and Lynher Growers from Herefordshire and Saltash respectively.

Excitingly this week, we’ve also been able to begin listing lots of new lines from one of our best and most-loved suppliers that we have, Hodmedod. These guys are a shining light in our sector and are involved in so much good work. New from them this week you’ll see on our list pearl barley, gluten-free oat flakes, red poppy seeds, wild mustard seeds, split green peas, yellow peas and naked fava beans.

Looking forward, on the back of a chance meeting that Cathryn had a couple of weeks ago in London during a national preparedness conference organised by Sustain, we may have bagged another new cheese supplier. Feltham’s Farm in South Somerset is the cheesemaker and all being well, these could be on the list as early as next week.

I’ve also had a recent chat with Futtle after a visit up to Fife to see them last November,- these guys are an amazing brewer from up in Fife that we used to have listed. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to soon list their selection of beers including a fabulous new farmhouse ale that we’ve nothing similar to on the list.

Procurement matters aside, our Alph has been on his jollies in Seville and managed to squeeze in a visit to our orange supplier, Gospa while he was there as featured below. And our Ell has been busy behind the scenes too, cleaning up a lot of our messy back-end software jobs. As part of her work, within a couple of weeks we should have storage, nutritional and general info listed on the price list for every line : )

To temper all that good news, spare a thought for I Frutti Del Sol, our supplier in Sicily whose farm is completely flooded after torrential rains. Those guys are not able to export at all this year. Thankfully we’ve been picking some up from Geima in their absence but the weather is affecting those guys too so this has been a challenging one of the blood orange front. To help, we have some sanguinellis from Gospa this week to supplement what Gemia have from Sicily.

This week’s veg updates:

• Starting in the UK, we’ve some red cabbage on next week again from Pollybell as well some Hiba spuds from Farrington’s.

• Elsewhere, we have a few returning farms this week including Mahollam with some 20kg bags of beetroot and carrots, Lynher Growers with some spring greens and kales both bagged and loose and lastly Trinity with purslane, mixed salad leaves and coriander.

• Growing Well add some more greens to their offering too with some Chinese cabbage and perpetual spinach.

• On the UK fruit front, Oakwood have a few boxes of their Fiesta apples for us to go at and Mole End have added some limited boxes of bramley apples.

• From Spain, as mentioned above, we have some sanguinelli blood oranges from Gospa next week to supplement what we’ll be getting from Geima.

• From Portugal, Vasco has added some loose and bunched white garlic.

• From Holland, Fairtrasa has some Elstar apples while Zann has some pointy red cabbages, marmande tomatoes, kumquats, limequats and some pink frost grapefruits which are often described as “grapefruit for people that don’t like grapefruit” thanks to their sweeter than average flavour.

• From France, Solagora has some 600g mixed boxes of blueberries and raspberries which are looking really good  as well as some blueberries, green peppers and yellow peppers.

• Our top pick outs from Dynamis this week are the asparagus, oxalis, radicchio castel franco, green shiatsu squash, mandarin with leaf and pomegranates.

• On the dairy front, we have some raw unsalted butter available from Caws Tefi next week. And beyond the dairy, their sister company Da Mhile Distillery has let us know that they have reduced the prices on some of their selected spirits.

• To line your pantry’s, we’ve some light golden sugar from Forest Wholefoods, as well as some more of their dried nuts and fruits. For those of you that love Carley’s nut butters, we’ve plenty of your faves back on the list including hazelnut butters, peanut butter, pumpkin seed butter and walnut butter.

• Before I sign off, just a quick note to anyone who buys Lakes eggs from us. They’ve let us know that over the past year, they have been introducing white laying hens to their free range and organic farms. They’ve had loadsa good feedback on these so far, so it looks like the white eggs are here to stay. This just means that your future orders may contain a mix of both white and brown shelled eggs.

I’ll end this week with a big congratulations from all us to both Pimhill and Shepherd’s Purse for making it into this year’s Great Taste Book. Their Jumbo Oats and Yorkshire Blue cheese respectively were both celebrated in the book and deservedly so too. That blue cheese is deffo one of the best we’ve ever listed.

Looking forward to next week, keep your eyes peeled for an offer that we’ll be repeating for new signups to Ooooby.

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

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