GO BEYOND FOUR SEASONS

PEAK SEASON BOX

Our Sourcing Team have selected the 9-10 varieties tasting their best right now. From familiar favourites to lesser known ones, these are our picks this week.

Monk's Beard - Agretti (Barba di Frate) – Lazio, Italy
Radicchio di Treviso –Treviso, Italy
Pink Navel Orange (Cara Cara) – Scordia, Sicily
Pear Passe Crassane – France
Brad's Atomic Grape Tomato – Almería, Spain
Cavolo Nero – Savona & Liguria, Italy
January King Purple Cabbage – Cornwall, UK
Purple Carrot – Dunkirk, France
Egremont Russet Apple – Sussex, UK
Meyer Lemon – Murcia, Spain

SAVOURING THE SEASON:
KIWIS

Fresh from Toulouse, Sebastien’s Hayward Green Kiwi has arrived, completing our range of seasonal kiwis. Although many do not consider their seasonality, kiwis can grow extremely well in mediterranean climates, with the right care. Not trees, but climbing vines, it takes a prolonged period of cold weather for kiwi fruits to become truly flavourful - but frost can be lethal. As such, kiwis are usually grown in controlled conditions and large, conventional producers will pick the fruit weeks before it is ready. Our growers go to great lengths to protect their vines from cold winds and excessive sun, only picking their kiwis later, when the sugars are developed and the flavour has flourished.

While we source the classic Green Hayward variety from Sebastien’s minimum intervention French farm, our Golden and Red Kiwis come from a cooperative in Calabria, who we started sourcing from a few years ago.

The cooperative model opens growers up to growing less conventionally lucrative produce. Strength in numbers as well as machinery and knowledge sharing has yielded some fantastic kiwis, that otherwise would not have been grown.