Winter Vege Bag - Week 1

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Kia ora winter

This is the first time we’ve run Ōtaki Vege Bags through winter, so thanks for coming along for this experiment!

We’ve got Ahoaho’s first (and only) Kūmara this week, after a pretty rough harvest.

As growth slows to a crawl over winter, we’ll be working with some other organic and spray free growers in the region to ensure good diversity of vege in the Ōtaki Vege bags. The majority will still be grown by Ahoaho & Crooked Vege. We’ll introduce these other growers as their produce enters the bags. This week, we’ve got leeks from Live2Give!

This week we have

1. Kūmara (from Ahoaho māra kai)

2. Salad Mix (Ahoaho māra kai)

3. Carrots (Ahoaho māra kai)

4. Coriander (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)

5. Tomatoes (the final few tomatoes until December!) or Capsicum (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)

6. Microgreens or Chillies (Crooked Vege)

7. Beetroot or Pak Choi (Crooked Vege)

8. Leeks (Live2Give Organics)

Vege highlights, tips & recipes

Microgreens

Microgreens are delicious as a garnish, mixed into a salad, or (as I often do) a very-lazy side salad on their own. They’re also really nutrient-dense by weight. Running vege bags through the winter, where it’s tougher to grow enough on the small amount of land when growth slows down to a third of its rate in summer, microgreens are a really great way to keep some tender-fresh-greenness in our lives.

We’ve been trialling some new microgreen systems here at Crooked Vege. We’ve been approached to stock microgreens (and other produce) for an organic section of a new local retailer focussing heavily on local producers, so we’ve been moving quickly to sort out our systems. So this weeks vege bag is the benefactor of that testing!

This mix is microgreens from a few different radish, daikon and rocket seeds grown in organic compost. We’ll be experimenting with a few different blends (this one is definitely a bit spicy), so the vege bags will see some variation in microgreens over winter.

This is the first time we’ve grown a large batch of microgreens at Crooked Vege. I (Jon) used to grow microgreens as part of my old job at Kaitake Farm. Microgreens are often an important part of small farm viability. The turnaround on microgreen production is fast (10-20 days for most varieties, depending on season), and don’t require a lot of space - speed and space are huge factors in small-farm financial viability. Microgreens also became pretty trendy over the last decade or so, and it’s been one the few crops where the free-market price represents a fair income for growers (although I noticed an undisclosed kapiti supermarket selling them at close to $200/kg - the grower is seeing much less than that).

However, despite the small footprint, a microgreens setup requires a significant amount of infrastructure investment. We did a small amount with some very DIY (massively inefficient systems) when we were establishing Crooked Vege, but the market has become a bit saturated and the trendiness has fallen away a little. So rather than investing thousands into improving our setup, we moved away from the typical small-farm financial-sustainability playbook for our wholesale work.

But it seems we finally have demand for micros from the new retailer opening later this month, and our own new space at Faith Fresh (which we run co-operatively with Te Horo’s Kai Ora Initiative. And running vege bags through winter means we’re needing to get creative to ensure we’re not subsisting entirely on kale and carrots.

Leeks - introducing Live2Give Organics

Live2Give Organics are supplying some great leeks to Ōtaki Vege Bags this week! Personally I use leeks anywhere I would use onions, if I don’t have a leek-specific recipe in mind.

Remember all of the leek is edible - a lot of people throw away the dark green parts, but these are just as delicious. They’re a pretty good spring onion subsitute, but I’ll also just fry the tops up when starting a meal the same way I would with onions.

A bit more about live2give

Live2Give are an organic farm based in Palmerston North and run an online organics shop that Crooked Vege supplies. They were nearly our first customer (our first customers were the people who purchased our kale and radishes out of a bucket in front of The Daily Coffee cart). But Live2Give have been with us nearly from the start.

Like all modern relationships, it started with a private message on instagram. We had barely started growing anything, but one of the head growers reached out to ask if they could support us by buying produce off us for their online shop. And it really was a strictly supportive action at first - they would collect from Crooked Vege and distribute it in their truck - through those first months of growing while building the farm, all we had was maybe a dozen bunches of pak choi and kale each week. The finances of buying from us probably didn’t make sense. But live2give have a genuine commitment to working locally (its not easy working with many small growers, when larger farms can deliver by the pallet, often at a cheaper price).

We didn’t have any cooling facilities, so we were harvesting by head torch at 4.30am to have their order ready when their truck arrived around 6am.

We’ve been supplying them nearly every single week since then over the last 2 years. I’d like to say we’re friends now, and Tobi and I have exchanged more than a few phone calls about the nerdiest details of cover cropping. They’re still our most important wholesale account, and Ōtaki Vege Bag’s likely wouldn’t be possible without them. So it feels pretty cool to have them supplying Ōtaki Vege Bags.

In our view, Live2Give are one of leaders in tractor-based organic vegetable production in Aotearoa. They have a very sincere commitment to do right by te taiao, and have been doing some fascinating work in direct-mulch transplanting systems. Essentially working with developing technologies to be able to mulch large fields, very often with their own cover-crop. Mulch might not sound exciting, but it can solve many issues in horticulture - nutrient leaching, soil erosion, reducing fertiliser use, weed management with less destructive tillage (and no chemicals), and improved resilience in increasingly unstable weather patterns. Farmers overseas have been working on these techniques at larger scale, but Live2Give are (as far as I’m aware) the only folks doing it here - with all the risk and steep learning curves that come with it. They’re doing important work for future food system resilience.

You can read more about Live2Give’s farm and research work here. And you can browse their online shop here.

Edit: I ran this text by Live2Give, to ensure we weren’t misrepresenting them. They had this very nice part to add “You didn’t mention one point - our choosing you and sticking with your products was not just about your proximity, it was primarily about your approach/mindset, which also results in fabulous produce. Your produce and our produce is the best we have, 100% reliable. We exist because we believe in quality- quality of method, quality of soil, quality of resulting produce. You are likeminded.”

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Ka kite ano,
Jon