Backyard Bounty all-Tasmanian Vegie box: 15th January

It’s amazing how much changes when you take a couple of weeks off… this week’s boxes look quite different to our last boxes in December!

Dendra Market Gardens’ yellow sweetness cherry tomatoes are back – and just as delicious as ever – and they’ve also got their new broccoletti up and running, which we’re hoping is going to be as popular for them as the celery we asked them to grow last season! Speaking of which, Dendra’s celery is also back, and they’ve even supplied us with some lovely coriander this week, with the roots on (which is always my preference if I can get it, as they’re just as useful as the leaf and stem.)

Grown for Taste have put in a range of leafy greens and salad for us – this week we’ve got baby Tuscan kale and salad mix – and York Town organics have also sent tatsoi and rocket. Apart from being delicious and healthy, the great thing about all of these bagged greens is that they’re packaged in biodegradable packaging; traditional plastic packaging is really great for keeping leaves fresh, but has the obvious environmental downside of creating a significant amount of plastic waste.

Whilst it’s shaping up to be a fairly patchy year for fruit, with quite inconsistent weather conditions, we’ve got beautiful blueberries from Tru Blu, super strawberries from DM Jennings & Sons, amazing moorpark apricots from the Apricot Farm in Granton and choice cherries from Cherries Tasmania. Not only is all the fruit in this week’s box Tasmanian (as it always is – our commitment is always buying local), but it’s actually all from southern Tasmania, and all these growers offer farm gate sales within an hour of Hobart!