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Our veg box scheme was founded on my blinkered assumption that most of our customers were like me, and grew up in a farm kitchen with a stock pot on the Rayburn, where mud was a way of life and dead animals hung in the larder. Over the years it has dawned on me that I was being a bit narrow-minded; even clean living urbanites with small kitchens like to eat veg and it is our job to help them, ideally without them losing the connection with where their food came from or those who grew it.
In one of our north-west facing fields, sunset shadows occasionally reveal the haphazard ridge and furrow lines left from when I made a mess of ploughing it as a teenager. Laying out straight, parallel ‘lands’ (sections) for ploughing and cultivating a field have been a mark of a horseman’s and then a tractor driver’s skill for centuries; since the results are plain for all to see, they are also the source of great pride and occasional shame.
It was reported last month that bacteria resistant to Colistin had been found in humans, pigs and pig meat in China. Colistin is the antibiotic of last resort, used against bacterial infections resistant to all others, and the source of the resistance is thought to be intensive factory farms. Penicillin was discovered in 1928 and revolutionised medicine but, with no major discoveries of antibiotics for treating E. coli and similar bacteria in 30 years, the World Health Organisation has warned that many common infections will no longer have a cure and could once again kill unabated.
We are picking savoy cabbage scheduled for February, purple sprouting broccoli that shouldn’t have ‘headed’ for another two months, while struggling to get through a surge of leeks that should have kept us busy through the new year. With just one frost so far, it has been too mild for too long and our plans are unravelling a little.
Taken as a whole, 2015 has treated us well. A bright and dry, if cool, spring allowed us to plant in good conditions, and though crops were slow to get away in the cold, all was well as we entered summer. The persistent dampness of late summer brought a spate of fungal disease, but the wonderfully bright and dry September and October were a gift to all farmers, allowing perfect ripening and harvesting conditions and a late rally in many crops.
Issue 12: Fairness and five years.
Find out more about Wicked Leeks and our publisher, organic veg box company Riverford.