Canes Stonefruit at Franklin is a Tasmanian institution – David and Diane pick all the fruit on their orchard with exacting standards, and while we’re sometimes able to sneak some of their fruit out of the valley to share with you in your boxes, they generally prioritise the many regular customers to the roadside stall they’ve built up over the years. Their peaches and nectarines are especially sublime, and especially sought after owing to the fact that there aren’t actually any large-scale peach or nectarine growers in the state. Sadly the fruit set has been very poor this year, so we probably won’t be enjoying these in boxes this season. Thankfully, however, we were able to get some of their delicious plums this week! The yellow plums are Shiro plums, cultivated by American botanist Luther Burbank in the late 1800s, and the red plums are Flavour Rouge, which are actually a cross between plums and apricots.
Grown for Taste are living up to their name with a mix of Sweet Cevenne and Red Tropea onions, which are sweet and mild salad varieties suited to using raw, but are equally good cooked, as well as delicious bunches of baby leeks, and mixed heirloom variety tomatoes. The cauliflowers in this week’s boxes are from Premium Fresh – we’ve often included their other lines in our boxes (carrots, broccoli, shallots) but this is their first year growing cauliflower, which like broccoli they grow in the summer months. This means we’ll be able to include cauliflower year round, as Southern Fields only grow cauliflower in the winter.
