It isn’t just a Veg-Box.
It’s always a joy to explore the contents of our new veg-box - surprise, variety and culinary challenge. After the pleasure that the neat box brings, the shapes and colours of the veg, come the early memories.
These earthy organic potatoes remind me of a summer on the coast of Lincolnshire, where land had just been reclaimed from the sea. Trenches had been ploughed out more than six feet deep, then stuffed with chemical fertilizer. Planted with potatoes, the soil threw up huge ungainly shapes, inedible, unlike these neat organic spuds.
This bunch of beetroots brings back the memory of the steaming-hot packs of beet we’d be handed over the front of the greengrocer’s shop. Fresh-boiled, the skin peeling away, wrapped in old newspaper.
Green peas recall Helsinki waterfront, where the Finns out shopping in the open market were nibbling handfuls and scattering the pods underfoot.
These great orange carrots are very different from a field-full I used to pass on a hill in Wales. The soil was so strange that the carrots came up without pigment, white. They tasted the same when we pulled them.
Swedes like these us boys’d steal from the cowshed, chop up with our jack knives to chew them raw, cool and sweet.
Cabbages – I’ll not forget days in all weathers hoeing and weeding, a sore back in the evening, hands in the morning curled up, stiff.
Squash, how dull they used to be. Now in the veg-box they’re various and elegant, a better size and a proper flavour.
Most of all, perhaps, it’s good to get the Brussels-sprouts gathered just at the moment when frost and flavour match. One of the great economies of scale only a veg box can bring!
Stan B, Patcham
It’s always a joy to explore the contents of our new veg-box - surprise, variety and culinary challenge. After the pleasure that the neat box brings, the shapes and colours of the veg, come the early memories.
These earthy organic potatoes remind me of a summer on the coast of Lincolnshire, where land had just been reclaimed from the sea. Trenches had been ploughed out more than six feet deep, then stuffed with chemical fertilizer. Planted with potatoes, the soil threw up huge ungainly shapes, inedible, unlike these neat organic spuds.
This bunch of beetroots brings back the memory of the steaming-hot packs of beet we’d be handed over the front of the greengrocer’s shop. Fresh-boiled, the skin peeling away, wrapped in old newspaper.
Green peas recall Helsinki waterfront, where the Finns out shopping in the open market were nibbling handfuls and scattering the pods underfoot.
These great orange carrots are very different from a field-full I used to pass on a hill in Wales. The soil was so strange that the carrots came up without pigment, white. They tasted the same when we pulled them.
Swedes like these us boys’d steal from the cowshed, chop up with our jack knives to chew them raw, cool and sweet.
Cabbages – I’ll not forget days in all weathers hoeing and weeding, a sore back in the evening, hands in the morning curled up, stiff.
Squash, how dull they used to be. Now in the veg-box they’re various and elegant, a better size and a proper flavour.
Most of all, perhaps, it’s good to get the Brussels-sprouts gathered just at the moment when frost and flavour match. One of the great economies of scale only a veg box can bring!
Stan B, Patcham