Winter Vege Bag - Week 13
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Warren’s (the onion grower) farm
Final week of “winter” vege bag season
This is about the coldest time of the year. So it feels a bit odd that next week the Ōtaki Vege Bag enters its “spring” season. A weird quirk of the way we structure the seasons (4 x 13 week seasons) and that we first launched this kaupapa with Ahoaho in November. We had to give things a name, and so here we are, calling next season “spring!”
This is the first time we’ve run Ōtaki Vege Bags through the winter. We didn’t really know how this experiment would go. Winter growing is slower (sometimes 3x longer for many crops) and more financially challenging (Crooked Vege employs 2.5 people - we do a lot of wholesale work to be able to pay wages that are still too-low, and we get a far better margin on summer cucumbers than we do winter silverbeet). We also need a lot more space to produce kai for Ōtaki Vege Bags - Ahoaho in particular is heavily limited in the space they have to grow - if everything is 2-3x slower to mature, you need 2-3x more space in winter to produce the same volume of kai.
We’ve learned some things, and will have better plans heading into the cool season next year, but widening the pool of growers that work in Ōtaki Vege Bags has been really powerful in keeping a reasonable diversity of crops. Crooked Vege in particular doesn’t have suitable whenua for producing winter staples like cabbage or brocolli, and neither farm has space for producing over a tonne of potatoes. Additionally, it’s felt really awesome to work with other fantastic organic producers nearby that we have relationships with - Kai Ora Initiative (Te Horo), Common Property (Te Horo), Live2Give (Palmy), Warren (Palmy) and Mingiroa Farm (Bulls). These are all producers who supply larger stores, where the mechanisms of food supply chains, retail markups etc would make the price a lot steeper than the $35 suggested price we’ve with run through winter. But the ŌVB model allows them an outlet that pays fairly (larger scale wholesale prices can fluctuate 200-300% week-to-week, where often the farmer ends up making a loss on their crop), yet is offered at an accessible price point.
This week we have:
Salad (Ahoaho māra kai)
Spring Onions (Ahoaho māra kai) or Fennel (Common Property)
Cabbage (Common Property)
Carrots (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Beetroot (Crooked Vege Ōtaki) or Onions (From Warren)
Microgreens, Parsley or Coriander (Crooked Vege Ōtaki)
Silverbeet (Crooked Vege)
Potatoes (Mingiroa Farm)
Ka kite ano,
Jon
