Last week we took the plunge in our house and decided to start ordering an organic vegetable box once a week. We have done this for two main reasons.
Firstly, organic vegetables taste better. We know this because we used to live in a property with a huge acreage where we grew our own vegetables and kept four free range chickens. Fresh eggs and fresh vegetables were delicious but the maintenance and upkeep was something neither of our family really had the time for so when we moved house three years ago we gave up the opportunity to do this. As we both know we simply do not have the time to tend to the garden let alone an allotment it seemed a far easier (and possibly cheaper) to buy our vegetables from a local farm. I say cheaper because by the time you have bought your seeds, grown your seedlings, spent money on watering your patch and taking time away from our work, I believe there is not a huge saving to be made buying shop bought vegetables.
Secondly, we believe that these days the number of pesticides and fertilisers used to create a large yield for farmers (who really are squeezed with their margins) does coincide a rise in the prevalence of various cancers. We have recently lost an old work colleague and friend of my husband’s to cancer and having researched the impact of toxins in our food chain and environment it really does not paint a good picture for the future. So we are now trying to know more about where our food comes from and how it is farmed.
So, the box we ordered was a large fruit and veg box which arrived last Friday from Riverford with an array of locally sourced where possible and organically grown vegetables. It contained carrots, celery, courgettes, a butternut squash, potatoes of varying sizes, spinach leaves, onions, dwarf beans. Fruits were British raspberries and bananas (these came from the Dominican Republic) but were farmed organically all the same.
Without waiting another second I got to making a hearty vegetable soup using the following ingredients:
1 onion
3 carrots
3 sticks of celery
1 courgette
two potatoes
1 butternut squash
a handful of spinach leaves
sage leaves and chives from my patio garden pot
Here is the video of me putting the ingredients all together.