Today is Beltane, the Celtic festival celebrating the start of summer. And we are being promised warm sunny weather! (at least for a few days). It seems an auspicious day to give a quick recap of our year so far and what we have planned for the rest of the year.
Seeds, Seeds, Seeds…
We must have planted thousands of seeds by now. We have a sowing list that we have been diligently ploughing our way through and germination rates have been great. We start them off on our heated seed bed in the small polytunnel and then move them down to the staging in our large polytunnel once germinated. Alasdair has been popping down every night to tuck them up with fleece (it’s been a cold wet Spring) but they are slowly growing away and they will love the warm temperatures forecast for the rest of this week.
New additions…
As I write Alasdair is planting up a new bed with asparagus crowns. It will be a couple of years before we see our first harvest but we are excited for the possibility of our own asparagus harvest. We also hope to see the first croppings of our soft fruit bushes this year – look out for blackcurrants, raspberries, gooseberries and strawberries at the market this year.
We are also welcoming some new hens. Sadly Mr Fox decimated our flock over the winter and we have discovered how much our customers appreciate our organic, free range eggs. We supplement our chicken food with leftover greens from the garden and the chickens are very partial to tomatoes and pumpkin seeds. We’ve got some very pretty Bluebells, Speckledys and White Sussex ladies from Craigievern Poultry and some Warren hybrids are coming to join them from The Hen House on Skye. We now have 3 Solway Chicken coops which we love as they are easy to clean and made of 100% recycled plastic. We are thinking of calling our chicken enclosure “Chookie Villas” – unless anyone has a better idea?
Veg Box Scheme
We have just sent emails to pre-registered and existing customers announcing that our veg box scheme is open for this year.
We operate a CSA style veg box scheme where you pay up front for a number of boxes to be delivered to your door.
This year the price is £200 for 10 boxes of 7-8 vegetables delivered fortnightly to your door on a Friday. You can skip a delivery (if you are away etc) and your order will roll over to 2 weeks later. The boxes are our priority and will have the freshest of seasonal veg ready to harvest that week.
Stronaba Produce Farm Shop
Our farm shop opening date is scheduled for Saturday 1st June. The ethos is fresh, local and seasonal. We will sell our own vegetables, eggs and jarred preserves and pickles. Hopefully honey later in the year. To begin with we plan to offer breakfast items, ingredients for ‘posh picnics’ and a small range of home cooked evening meals. There will be lots of our favourite local producers – Great Glen Charcuterie, Rora Yoghurt, Highland cheeses, MacNutty’s Granola, local baking and we hope to offer a marketplace for local producers.
Look out for the signs!
Stronaba Produce Kitchen
Liz is now working for the business full time. She is in charge of all seed sowing and transplanting. The kitchen has produced jams, marmalades (including a collaboration with Bealach gin) and chutneys ready for the new season. Fully booked early season treks for Wild Roots Guiding and Mountain Yoga Kinlochleven have seen the production kitchen in full swing. Early season favourites appear to be cheese and wild garlic scones and GF/vegan knekkebrod.
Regular cooking and baking days are planned to stock the shop with a range of evening meals, pastries and baking – with some gluten free/allergen aware options.
When she can sneak away from the kitchen Liz can be found planting seeds in her greenhouse. She has had a cutting garden for several years but plans to expand it this year and offer buckets of seasonal flowers for sale either from the farm shop or added to the veg box deliveries. She has also planted a range of herbs and edible flowers that she will be selling in the shop and at Glen Spean Market.
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