Last week, we picked our final tomatoes of the year. With artificial heat, the UK season can now run into December but the energy cost of keeping single-glazed glass at the 20℃ needed for ripening is truly insane. Demand for British tomatoes and their commercial viability don’t make it OK, and it’s the reason Riverford never sells fruit or veg grown under heated glass.
To add to the madness, flavour declines rapidly with falling light levels (which is why out-of-season tomatoes tend to be tasteless). Our tomatoes, cucumbers, chillies, and peppers will be followed by salad leaves – field radicchio, komatsuna, mizuna, mustard, and Salanova lettuce make up our nutritious and vibrant salad bags through the winter, supplemented with lamb’s lettuce, grown by one of our neighbours in the French Vendée.
We are also in the middle of a monster crop of early purple sprouting broccoli and most of the brassicas continue to make up the growth lost to summer’s drought, with some now surpassing expectations. Storms Austen and Boelo gave us 60mm of rain, which was gratefully soaked up by the earth and drawn down to replenish a four-month water deficit in the subsoil, but the damp has also allowed in the first disease with some cauliflowers developing head rots.
Luckily, Erica and Matt Skewes, our newly recruited growers on the cliffs east of Penzance, are faring better. This area, known as the Golden Mile, seems to have the ideal microclimate for winter cauliflowers – maybe it’s the temperature-moderating effect of the sea which protects from frost, or the soil’s fertility which has been enhanced by generations of hauling seaweed off the beaches of Mount’s Bay.
Sadly, not even these advantages have sustained many of the local growers through the squeeze of recent years. So when the Skewes had had enough of milking their cows, we were delighted to welcome them into the Riverford fold, with help from our highly experienced Devon grower, Cathy Case.
Wherever we are and whatever we do for a living, we will all have to adapt, and last night at Riverford we held our co-owners’ screening of The People’s Emergency Briefing, which stimulated discussion and helped us feel more proactive in preparing for the changes we all now inevitably face.
Image taken at Riverford’s Wash Farm by Emma Stoner
Our News from the Farm posts come from Riverford. They are the digital versions of the printed letters which go out to customers, every week via Riverford’s veg boxes. Guy Singh-Watson’s weekly newsletters connect people to the farm with refreshingly honest accounts of the trials and tribulations of producing organic food, and the occasional rant about farming, ethical, and business issues he feels strongly about.
0 Comments