It seems that the vegetable sector has managed to have the best of both worlds this summer, with the changeable weather suiting crops and feeding consumer demand. And with the weather even being kind to that all-important pumpkin crop, spirits are up.
The weather this summer has arguably been more beneficial for the salad category, but winter-type vegetables such as broccoli, carrots and cauliflower have had their time to shine when the temperature has dropped and fickle consumers have swapped their lettuce bowls for comforting soups.
As reported in FPJ, Tesco saw sales of winter produce lines excel in July, with roasting potato sales up 450 per cent, parsnips up 120 per cent, swedes up 90 per cent and carrots up 62 per cent. The supermarket has made sure that it is also stocked up for August and ready for any dull days.
Meanwhile, niche vegetable lines are still battling the credit crunch. The English fennel season has just come into full swing and it is expected to last until early December, providing that frosts stay at bay. Swede is static and still has its core followers but, once the economy has recovered, expect some innovative marketing in this area to get the root vegetable into consumers’ kitchens.
In Lincolnshire, innovation is already on the agenda and sea kale is being grown on a small scale, with the aim of offering the product to the foodservice and wholesale sectors. It has already had some success in the hands of a grower in Scotland. Another sea vegetable, samphire, is also receiving some attention from growers across the UK and in Europe, with the UK market in mind.
So despite these cash-tight times, innovation in the vegetable sector has not died. As the British Brassica Growers’ Association (BGA) continues its Save the Cauliflower campaign, the vegetable’s Italian cousin, broccoli, has not been forgotten, with the launch into Sainsbury’s of the long-stemmed floret brand Bellaverde, which claims to not be as “bitter” as regular broccoli varieties. This comes five years after the successful introduction of fellow sweet-tasting Tenderstem broccoli, so it looks like this fashionable vegetable is going to be attracting further popularity in the years to come, as the industry plays on its pulling power. These new varieties also offer consumers the best of both worlds and turn the traditional use of broccoli as a winter vegetable on its head, with the use of Tenderstem and Bellaverde in salads and the like.
British cauliflower, broccoli, purple sprouting broccoli, cabbage and global artichokes are all faring well in the warm and, at times, wet weather. Growers have been looking into reducing labour overheads on land with packing rigs. With this technology, all waste from the harvest remains on the field and the product is transported straight from the harvest, making it fresher.
New-season, home-grown sweetcorn is flourishing and, in Sussex, growers are now in their fifth week of harvest. “Our early crops have performed well in volume and quality,” says one insider. “However, we do look forward to hopefully much better weather in the rest of August and September to help mid-season field yield and our market sales.”
Nevertheless, demand for sweetcorn is up 25 per cent for some growers, with bright, warm summer days bringing the barbecues out, even if it is short-lived until the next cold patch.
Ready for the Halloween surge in demand, the pumpkin crop is looking good and yields should be plentiful. Maturity and quality may still be affected by future weather and growers certainly do not need any more rain or dull weather - but at the moment, the pumpkins are growing to schedule.
“Demand for pumpkins is expected to be extremely strong, as the current competitive retail environment should market the Halloween event very aggressively this forthcoming autumn,” believes one source.
Isle of Wight squash fields are also looking very promising, despite the slight drawback of wet weather holding back the formation of female flowers. Squash yields might be less than the pumpkin crop, which set earlier, indicating good cropping.
English peas and beans are also in full swing and the pea sub-category is coming to the end of its short eight-week season, with growers anxious to harvest and process as quickly as possible, to guarantee freshness and quality. Pea growers in Lincolnshire ended their harvest the first week of August, in far from favourable conditions, with nearly 50mm of rain falling. Despite this, the harvest has been reported as successful.
Machinery has helped the pea industry dramatically in the UK, with most innovations coming from Dutch engineering. Now, viners pick, de-pod and store in a matter of seconds, which enables 24-hour-a-day harvests. And somewhat against the grain, organic peas for freezing have seen an increase in demand from high-end retailers.
The Processors and Growers Research Organisation (PGRO) continually invests time into finding new varieties of peas, but the major concern for the future is the possibility of active controls being taken away from pea growers. “Peas are very sensitive and need certain products to ensure the plants survive to harvest,” says one insider. “It is a very short and stressful harvest, so if something goes wrong, like a disease gets hold of the crop, that is the whole year wasted.”
Meanwhile, UK garlic crops are booming, as rumours abound that Chinese garlic yields will see a 30-40 per cent decrease due to would-be growers relocating to the cities.
Following two years of near disaster for its crop, The Really Garlicky Company in Nairn has harvested the best crop of Scottish garlic it has ever had. Blighted by a virus in 2007 and low volume in 2008, the annual harvesting began the first weekend of August.
The company says that the quality of the garlic is better than it has ever been, although the recent wet weather made lifting conditions very challenging.
SUMMER SUCCESS FOR COURGETTES
This year, we seem to have seen a consistent demand for courgettes and I think all our years of growing have given us some great data to create a very effective formula for consistent production, writes Barfoots of Botley’s farm manager for courgettes in the UK, Christian Maltby.
We have carefully programmed our production to try to exactly match our customers’ requirements. This can be very difficult as courgettes have a nasty tendency to produce a great yield just when sales drop off in hot weather, which tends to drive salad sales. But this year, that has not been the case.
As usual, the weather is very much a game of two halves with some very favourable late spring/early summer weather followed by a very average early summer. But the rain was a bit of a blessing, as keeping up with irrigation work on the courgette fields was becoming a little challenging because we do not seem to have had as much rain as some of the northern areas.
We started to harvest courgettes on June 1, which was a week earlier than last year and a week later than the year before - so spot on target. The early part of the season was dry and bright with steady temperatures, so we had some really good courgettes without any major quality issues.
June provided us with ideal courgette weather and the plants were put on a really good frame and in a good position to tolerate the wind and rain that we experienced in July. As a result, fruit was sufficiently off the ground and avoided the worst of the soiling that is typical of picking courgettes during a wet period. The rain, however, was very welcome for the late crop, which is looking fantastic at the moment and seems to have responded very well to a good watering.
We picked up some new business for courgettes this year and, as a farm, are now entrusted with 90 per cent of supply to the packhouse, which has led to us seeing a little more than a 50 per cent increase in area on last year. I am hoping this will deliver a better yield than last year, which was marked by a very difficult late season that we all hope will not be repeated. So far, we are just a little lower on yield than this time last year, but this year we have a greater geographical spread.
Barfoots started to grow courgettes in 1986, when Marks & Spencer was keen to develop relationships with growers and asked Peter Barfoot to start a crop. Some five acres were planted that year and other products, specifically sweetcorn, soon followed.
Further relationships developed afterwards and Barfoots rapidly evolved from being a grower into a vertically integrated food supply business, which now supplies more than 30 products from 30 different countries. The team has, of course, learnt a lot on the way, particularly the importance of effective relationships with both customers and suppliers, and continues to evolve and learn as the business develops into new areas such as asparagus.
We are continually looking at new courgette varieties to improve quality and yield. I have been particularly interested in shorter and easy-to-pick varieties such as Tuscany, as these have delivered a good early yield. The fruits are a lot easier to find and manage than in a more bushy crop like Ambassador, which despite its age, I still benchmark other varieties against. Syngenta has also been putting a lot more effort into looking at UK-suitable varieties, which I am trialling extensively this year.
Labour is still a concern in the vegetable industry as a whole and with recent legislation, it will become even harder to attract good people. As the hours people are permitted to work decrease, their weekly pay check inevitably also falls and, with labour representing 75 per cent of the costs of a courgette crop, it is here that we first look for efficiency and savings.
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