It’s been a snowy week – certainly not something that’s a common event, and indeed Tasmania has recorded its new lowest ever temperature, negative 14.2 degrees at the wonderfully named Liawenee. Farming is one of the most weather-dependent endeavours out there, but, despite threats that snow would make it impossible for Matt to harvest our celeriac order, there haven’t been any significant shortages of produce this week. Logistics, on the other hand…
Produce for each week’s boxes generally starts coming in Tuesday, with some coming Wednesday and then more again Thursday, from locations across Tasmania. On Tuesday I headed down to collect potatoes from John in Lymington and apples from the Duggans in Cradoc, figuring that any frost or ice over the saddle would have melted and there wouldn’t be 
any issues. The drive down was completely clear, but an hour later on the same road driving back the snow hit – and indeed the road was closed about half an hour after I’d managed to get through (see picture above!). The closure of the midlands highway caused some of our orders from the north-west to be a day late – these usually come down in “line-haul” refrigerated trucks overnight with SRT, and due to the road closures no trucks came down on Tuesday night. Thankfully, almost everything that was supposed to come down Tuesday night was able to come down during the day on Wednesday, but due to the very heavy snow in Launceston, a completely unforseen event led to one necessary change of plans… our order with York Town Organics was kept in the cool-store overnight at Launceston, as above because the line-haul trucks weren’t going that night. Come Wednesday morning, the snow had caused the collapse of the roof of the said cool-store, and our order was lost with the building. Of all the things that I had expected to go wrong because of the weather, this certainly wasn’t one of them! Thankfully we were able to source Houston’s Farm spinach to replace the lost order. As always, we appreciate the work our great farmers do to make sure you get beautiful, fresh produce each week – but getting all the produce where it needs to be so it can be delivered to your doorstep on Friday takes the coordinated work of a whole other set of people, and SRT in particular are unsung heroes of Tasmanian agriculture.
