Hartwell Lane Greengrocers

The first cut of the back-garden rows

The polytunnel rows finished a fortnight ago and the outdoor beds at the smallholding two valleys over are finally giving us a few crates a week. The lettuces are a touch small for the box scheme yet, but the leaves are clean and they taste of something. We have been putting them out in mixed bunches with the spring onions because singles do not really hold up by Saturday evening.

Rhubarb is still strong from the old crowns at the bottom of the allotments. I cut the last of the forced sticks two weeks back and we are now into the proper outdoor crop — coarser, greener at the leaf-end, more useful for jam than for crumbles. If anyone is after forced rhubarb specifically, the Pickering grower up the line still has a tunnel running until the end of the month, but he is selling out by Wednesday lunchtimes.

Asparagus from the Vale of York started last week. We have a standing order for ten bunches a week through to the cut-off in mid-June and it usually moves before noon on Saturday. If you want a bunch held back, ring the shop on Friday afternoon and we will set one aside.

A long week at Hebden

Three of us were down at Hebden Bridge market all of Saturday and most of Sunday morning. The crowd was thinner than the bank holiday weekend last year, which I expected — the weather was uncertain on Saturday and a lot of the day-trippers turned back. We still cleared the van by mid-afternoon, mostly thanks to the rhubarb and the late purple-sprouting broccoli, which has been a slow seller everywhere else.

I had a long conversation with one of the cheese stall holders about who in the valley is still doing kale at this point in the season. The honest answer is nobody much — the overwintered crop is gone and the new sowings are not in yet. We have a window of three or four weeks where leafy greens come from poly-tunnel cuts and not much else, and the box scheme tends to look thin during it.

The hungry gap is the test of a good greengrocer, not the glut. Anyone can stack a table in August.

New onion grower in Lincolnshire

We have moved our brown-onion supply across to a smaller family farm near Spalding after fifteen years with the previous wholesaler. The change has been on the cards since autumn — the old route was getting unreliable through the winter, with two missed deliveries in February that nearly cost us the box scheme. The new lot are cleaner-skinned, slightly smaller on average and a fraction more expensive, but they keep better in the storeroom and the drivers turn up when they say they will.

Reds and shallots still come from the same place as before. Garlic is now half from Norfolk and half from a French wholesaler we picked up at the trade day in Manchester in January. The Norfolk garlic is, in our view, better — but it is finished by late summer and we need the French stock to bridge through to next year's harvest.