We’ve often been asked: why do you restrict harvesting to just two days a week? Why not pick more frequently, or harvest ahead to fill the boxes early? The answer is simple — and nonnegotiable: quality, nutrition, integrity.
Because we dispatch our veg boxes on Friday and Saturday, we choose to concentrate harvesting on Thursday and Friday — and that decision is central to the trust we ask you to place in us. It’s not a matter of convenience, but of principle.
The Case for Thursday & Friday Harvesting
1. Nutritional urgency
From the moment a leaf, a pea pod, or a head of broccoli is severed from the plant, its life of decline begins. Nutrients — especially vitamin C and volatile compounds — start degrading immediately. While supermarkets can protract “freshness” through refrigeration, controlled atmospheres, and moisture retention, those measures can’t fully arrest nutrient loss.
We don’t want to rely on tricks or compromises. If we harvested to early (say, Wednesday) we risk losing that vital edge in flavour and vigour by delivery day.
2. Synchronising with delivery cadence
Because the boxes head out Friday and Saturday, harvesting on Thursday gives us a buffer day for packing, quality checks, and handling, while keeping produce still extremely fresh. Harvesting Friday ensures the absolute freshest picks make it into the very next round of boxes.
In other words: Thursday → fresh enough; Friday → freshest possible.
3. Avoiding over-harvest and waste
If we harvested large reserves earlier in the week to cover Friday and Saturday, we’d have to store much more in our cooler and that means letting produce degrade before it even reaches you. Our model values minimal storage and maximum turnover: produce should move quickly, not linger and it should reach the customer while still bursting fresh.
4. Transparency and accountability
When we commit to “harvest on Thursday and Friday only,” we hold ourselves to a public promise. We can confidently say: when you open your box, you are receiving produce harvested just hours ago. That’s a stronger promise than vague “farm-fresh” claims. It’s a performance standard we have set ourselves as well as a promise to our customers.
What This Means for You (and for Us)
- If you order a Friday box, much of its contents were harvested on Friday.
- If you collect your box on Saturday, it still include produce harvested Friday.
- You won’t see us harvesting on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday for your box — because by Friday, the nutritional and flavour cost would be too high.
- On weeks with challenging weather, we may be forced to adjust slightly — but we always aim to preserve that Thursday/Friday window as our anchor.
A Commitment, Not a Compromise
Some might say, “What difference would it realy make to harvest extra midweek and just store it carefully until Friday?” Two problems: first, storage and handling always exact a cost — in energy, in infrastructure, and in unavoidable losses. Second, this is a consumer trust business. We don’t want to sell “nearly fresh” or “high-freshness enabled by tech tricks.” We want to sell freshness itself.
So yes — it’s a more constrained, demanding way to farm. But it’s the way we preserve the integrity of your box, the nutrients in your vegetables, and our promise to you: that what you receive is as close as possible to what just came off the field.
So when a customer calls us on a Friday and asks can they be included in this weeks boxes, we have to refuse and we feel bad about it, but we don’t do it for convenience — we do it for quality.
NOTE: We do try to always have fresh vegetables in the farm shop, even of that means having to harvest on Saturday or Sunday
