Maintaining our Honesty

With so many new customers, and with us having had a particularly chaotic time of the year, I wanted to take the chance to explain why some of the food that features in your box does not come from our farm. We probably overthink these things more than perhaps we should, but our integrity is what makes Green Connect so special and maintaining honesty and transparency with our customer base is really important to us.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a model popular in parts of the world that involves customers or ‘members’ paying a subscription fee a season in advance and having a share in the weekly harvest. The radical thing about this model is that it spreads the risk and rewards among the community, rather than all the risk being born by the farmer. It also offers a way for customers to build a connection with the people who grow their food, and the land from which it comes.

When designing our veg box model six years ago, we wanted to uphold as many of the principles of CSA as we could, while acknowledging that we needed to meet our customers halfway. In today’s economic climate, very few people are able to pay for a season’s worth of veg upfront, people want optionality to pause their box if they go away, and people want variety in what they receive. A season of just lettuce and beets isn’t going to keep many customers.

So, we built a much more customer friendly model, and have tweaked things over time based on customer feedback. From the start, we knew that there are things we would never grow, notably potatoes and onion, which are crops that just don’t suit our climate, landscapes or growing systems. We have always purchased these from other organic growers through a wholesaler in Sydney. Our fruit also comes from these suppliers, as our trees are too young to be producing.

This season, we have been purchasing extra veg from these suppliers, due to some production issues we’ve been having with our own crops. The last year has been chaotic, we have been transitioning new staff into new roles, expanding our community and non-commercial spaces, and generally trying to do more work with less time and resources. And this has resulted in some underwhelming crops, especially for things like carrots and cauliflowers.

Rather than giving you radish and bok choy every week, we decided to outsource more of our produce for a couple of months, which allows us to feature additional veg like cauliflower, carrot, sweet potato, and beans.

I’ve got to say though, our winter gardens are looking good, and I’m very confident that we can be supplying more and more of these items ourselves very soon.

Thanks for the understanding and the continued support.

Cal Champagne
Green Connect Farm Manager

In your box:

Note: We sometimes need to make changes to what we pack in your veg box based on the quantity and quality of fruit and veg that we can harvest and source. If you have any questions about what is in your veg box, don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected].

Did you know?

Turmeric is a fragrant, warm, and bitter spice that comes from the rhizome or root of the tall, herbaceous turmeric plant. Native to Southeast Asia, turmeric is a popular spice in Indian and other Asian cooking. Curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric, has been used in traditional medicine and is being studied as a pain reliever and healing agent. You can add grated turmeric root to stews, soups, scrambled eggs, vinaigrette dressings, or rice before cooking. You can also simmer it with ginger in hot water for several minutes to make tea.