Whew! Mr & Mrs BB rolled into Hobart on the tenth after a glorious week taking Boris the BB van for a holiday on Flinders Island, expecting a reasonably leisurely easing-in period for the remainder of January… but clearly the fates had other plans. This week Backyard Bounty have packed over 270 boxes of delicious, fresh Tassie produce – smashing all previous records – and between Pops BB, Mr BB, “Fingers” from Jet Couriers and even Mrs BB we’ve somehow managed to deliver about 230 of them to the right addresses too! Things have really been pushed to the limits this week so if we’ve managed to mix up your order in the mayhem, please let us know by email and we’ll figure things out.
This week we’ve introduced our new $25 fruit-only box, and we’ve done our best to really make your dollar work hard for you; a kilo of succulent nectarines from Canes Stonefruit at Franklin (leave these for a couple of days on the bench for full juiciness, or keep them in the fridge if you want to eat them later in the week), half a kilo each of sweet strawberries, blueberries and cherries (which by the way were picked fresh yesterday!), and a punnet of certified organic raspberries from Longley Organic Farm. We’ll do our best to make sure each week’s box is a little bit different to the last, and we’d love to include home-grown fruit too; so if you’ve got an over productive fruit tree and want to trade in the fruit for cash or credit towards BB boxes then please do let us know!
We’ve also started distributing Avoland avocados, which are genuinely Tasmanian – grown near Ulverstone in the north-west of Tasmania – and to celebrate, all boxes (apart from the fruit-only boxes) have one medium-sized avocado. We’ll also offer these every week for the great price of $8 for half a kg in addition to including one in your box reasonably often – you’re welcome to add these to your subscription as a standing order for the next couple of months while they’re in season. Avocados can take a little while to ripen, but if you want to speed things up a bit, keep them warm and store them with fruit that releases the natural gas ethylene, which triggers most fruits to ripen. DON’T store them in the fridge unless they’re fully ripe though, as this can cause them to rot.
This week’s $40 and organic boxes are lucky to be receiving some rather spectacular heirloom tomatoes from the lovely George & Hilary at Grown for Taste, along with their super-sweet onions – you can use the whole thing from stem to bum, but probably don’t eat the straggly bit at the bottom… The short season for Tassie peas has now all but ended (and sadly many of them actually ended up going to waste due as pea harvesters were overloaded when weather caused them to all mature at the same time), but Harvest Moon are now picking green beans, which tend to have a slightly longer season and are always going to be much fresher than mainland supply! We’ve also heard from Elphin Grove that with the balmy weather it won’t be too long til corn starts…
