What we’re growing this year
With the first box deliveries in May fast approaching now is a good time to let you know what we have planned for this year. Crop planning is a huge deal for us - a lot of thought needs to go into how we can get the maximum harvest from our small land area, while preserving soil fertility and ensuring that every week we have a good mix of produce to go into the boxes. We try to grow varieties that are appropriate for our climate, but also use our polytunnels to grow more tender crops like tomatoes, and to extend our growing season.
In the ground right now we still have some winter chard, spinach (perpetual and annual) plus oriental salad mix. If you’d like to try our produce these are available right now in the Crunchy Carrot in Dunbar!
As we move into march we’ll be harvesting spring greens and purple sprouting broccoli - standard ‘hungry gap’ crops that, again, we’ll be supplying to our wholesale partners.
When box deliveries start in May we hope to have broad beans, leeks, beets, pak choi and lots of salad on the go. Our salad tends to vary throughout the season - we aim to have a constantly changing mix of different lettuces, baby spinach and chard leaves, spicy oriental greens and even beet leaves to give an attractive and tasty mix. Salad is a major crop for us as we can grow it all season long in East Lothian and it grows rapidly making it space and time efficient.
Beans are some of the most satisfying crops for us to grow as the taste of truly fresh green beans is unrivalled. We’ll have french, runner and broad beans as well as snap peas and pea shoots for the salads.
Moving into summer we’ll have our pointed green and red cabbages which were a particular hit with our customers last year. We use F1 hybrid varieties for most of our brassicas due to their unrivalled productivity. We also branch out into some more unusual veg with bulb fennel, kohlrabi and salad turnips going into the boxes as well as the famously trippy looking Romanesco Cauliflowers.
We’re excited this year to be growing our tomatoes from seed we saved last year from the varieties that did best for us: black cherry, sunviva, ailsa craig and matina. We love doing this as it’s a great way both to save money and also to ensure that we’re growing the varieties that best suit our particular conditions. It’s remarkably easy to save seed from tomatoes as they don’t cross-pollinate so you can just select the biggest and best fruits from the crop and use those. They need to be fermented before you save the seed to remove the coating which prevents germination, but after that they’re good to go!
All season long we also supply various herbs from coriander and parsley to basil, dill and spring onions.
Finally in the autumn we’ll have our winter squashes. The small hokkaido squashes are particularly delicious - not fibrous at all and packed with flavour so they’re great for roasting or even making smooth sauces with.
