Backyard Bounty all-Tasmanian Vegie box: 10th August

This week’s boxes feature the great work that Maurice and the team at Dendra Gardens have been doing – we literally ordered a truck-load of produce from them this week, including 325 bunches of carrots, 275 bunches of spring onions, and 140 bunches of silverbeet, along with some gorgeous baby beets, buk choy, and potatoes, wombok (which has sadly finished for the season as the cabbages start to bolt to seed) and leeks for our wholesale customers. We’re looking forward to finding a time to visit their Cuprona farm to learn more about their operation and share some photos and information with you.

Southern Fields have supplied us with a heap of cauliflowers (300 to be precise) and cos lettuce hearts this week, but we’re also really pleased to have gotten one of their less common lines for $20 and $25 boxes this week. During the warmer months iceberg and cos lettuce is the main crop at Ben & Amy’s Forcett farm, but during the winter months growth is slower and they switch from iceberg lettuce to cauliflower. At the very beginning and end of the iceberg season they do limited quantities of undersize iceberg lettuce as twin packs (similar to the cos hearts). These small lettuce don’t meet the supermarket specs, but we’re always really happy to see farmers finding a way to market produce that is great quality but doesn’t meet an arbitrary cosmetic standard, and when I saw some boxes of these on the truck for another customer last week I got straight onto making sure we could get some for our boxes too!