Get Ready! Your Winter Veg is Lookin So Good

It's Saturday morning and as I write this I am close to the fire watching the rain fall slightly at an angle outside of our living room window. The southerly buster has arrived overnight and the temperature has plummeted. The morning has been spent chasing the neighbours cows out of our fields of vegetables where the soft muddy ground is allowing them to do quite a bit of damage. I also had to finish off planting the cauliflowers which were missed late yesterday evening when we ran out of daylight.

The fields were already very wet despite the short break in rain we received this week, which means the worms are migrating to higher ground or making their way under bits of timber left around the farm. They dont mind when it rains, but when we get too much wet weather they obviously start to suffocate in the soil. The arrival of slugs has been slow and I have only just spotted a couple this morning. They think this wet cold weather is divine and their numbers will explode if we don't use some elemental iron pellets to control their numbers.

The vegetables we were busy planting in early march are finally starting to mature ready for harvest, I did the first pick of Broccolini stems on Friday and the Broccoli heads look ready to harvest next week. The cabbage will come next and then the Cauliflowers and hopefully around the same time our newest variety called Song Cauliflower will also be ready.

This new variety is also called sweet stem cauliflower or loose curd cauliflower, popular and commonly grown in Asia, green-stem cauliflower is sweeter and more tender than standard white-stemmed varieties. We hope you will give it a try and if you like it please let us know so we can make it a permanent winter crop on our farm.

Finally, I would just like to say a big thankyou to everyone whom reads our newsletters and has written to us to explain how much they are being enjoyed. I have also met many of you out in town or at the beach who have given me such wonderful feedback. It makes us feel much closer as a community when we have something like this to connect you to the food you eat and after all, it is this connection that we value more than anything else.