What’s in Season, what’s out?
Frozen ground and heavy snow have made harvesting tricky, with roots locked in place one moment and greens buried in snow the next. Cauliflower season is now over and some crops, like kale and purple sprouting broccoli, have taken a battering from the cold and are regrowing very slowly. As the weather tightens its grip, overall variety inevitably narrows, with only the hardiest crops holding on.
In these cold months, tender winter salads like watercress and mustard leaves thrive under cover in polytunnels, while Kalettes, kales and cabbages are in steady supply. All kinds of root veg carrots, parsnips, celeriac, turnips, swedes, Jerusalem Artichokes and stored produce like potatoes, onions and squashes are also available. Some squashes and onions are running low, but onions’ frost-proof cousin the leek is still going strong, able to be picked frozen and thawed overnight.
How to Avoid Synthetic Pesticides
Pests are a regular headache for farmers – cabbage root flies, aphids, slugs and leaf miners can ruin crops if left unchecked, so farmers often turn to synthetic pesticides to solve these problems, but these chemicals are harmful to the environment, and residues remain on the food we eat.
Ingesting pesticides increases risks to hormone regulation, development, and even cancer, and the “cocktail effect” of consuming multiple different chemicals amplifies this. Alarmingly, Pesticide Action Network UK (PAN UK) has found that pesticides are now found in 8 out of 13 children tested in the UK, and has identified the 12 foods with the most residues: grapefruit, grapes, limes, bananas, sweet peppers, melons, beans, chillies, mushrooms, broccoli, and aubergines.
Supporting farmers who grow sustainably is vital to creating a food system that protects soil, wildlife, pollinators, and our health. Organic and agroecological farms avoid synthetic chemicals, instead using companion planting, crop rotations, natural predators, and biodiversity to manage pests.
Weathering the Winter
It’s hard to overstate the importance that weather plays in the day-to-day life of a farmer. They can’t harvest root veg when the ground is frozen for risk of breaking them. They can’t harvest leafy greens when they are buried in snow, and when it is wet farmers avoid walking on the fields as it can disrupt soil structures and impact soil health.
So what is a farmer to do?
Many of the farmers we buy produce from use this time to do all of the tasks that have fallen by the wayside while they’ve been busy in the field over the past year – cleaning and mending tools, clearing out workshops and polytunnels, and clever uses of frost, like leaving pots outside to kill pests and bacteria naturally.
It is also a crucial time for planning the coming year. No year is the same, but last year followed a trend of years becoming drier and drier, and many farmers will be thinking about how the rising temperatures will affect this oncoming year and how that will affect what they can feasibly grow.
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