Our veg boxes are tops!
July 5, 2009
Above is our first standard veg box.
We’ve had an enthusiastic response from our members to Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s first vegetable boxes. This is despite some teething problems with distribution.
Tony says:
“The box looks fantastic! We’re looking forward to next week’s already.”
John and Cathy are delighted with the quality:
“The cucumber which was sweet and fresh and the lettuce and onion we used in a salad.”
They like the wide and interesting variety of vegetables and have found new ways of using them:
“The beet greens we cooked almost like a spinach or spring greens and had with fish – better than spinach – along with broad beans and potatoes.
The beets will be roasted and eaten with a lamb casserole with the rest of the onion, turnips and courgettes and we will try your broad bean soup. Nothing wasted.”
In the end, both small and standard boxes contained potatoes, broad beans, beetroot, turnip, cucumber and onions. Standard boxes had a salad pack and small boxes a lollo rosso lettuce. In addition, standard boxes contained Swiss chard and courgettes. There wasn’t enough time to pick parsley.
We have a glut of broad beans, so each box was given an extra £4-worth at shop prices! We don’t yet have our own poly tunnel, so our three expert growers – Jane, Jeremy and Mark – supplied the salad bags, lettuce, courgettes and cucumber.
New team
Grateful thanks to our volunteer picking and packing team of expert grower Mark Norman, Mike H, Penny, Robert and Trish. Mark says:
” It’s great to see some new faces. I hope the boxes going out means that we’ll see even more volunteers next week.
As first boxes they are excellent. I hope we can keep the variety going.”
If you would like to volunteer, either picking and packing or planting and cultivating, just turn up on a Friday or Sunday between 10 a.m. and 12 noon.
Compost bin
This Sunday we constructed a compost bin from wooden pallets lashed together with binder twine. At long last we have somewhere to dump the annual weeds, unwanted plant tops and thinnings.
A great deal of effort was devoted to the backbreaking job of cutting down the remaining dock leaves to stop them going to seed and spreading all over the site. We were grateful there were so many of us to share this potentially soul-destroying task!
We weeded the Swiss chard, carrots and brussels sprouts. We planted more radishes to replace the ones which had gone to seed in the hot weather.
A big thank you to expert growers Jane and Mark N and Charlotte, Danny, Ian, Mark M, Mike H, Mike S.
