We'll get that in Waitrose, it'll be cheaper....

Yesterday I overheard a customer telling her partner to put down the vegetables he was about to buy; "we'll get that in Waitrose, it'll be cheaper".

So today I checked her assumption, and am happy to report it was incorrect:

At the moment our broccoli is £2.50 per kilo, Waitrose is £1.69 per 300g head (or £5.64 per kilo, twice the price of ours). Our baby new potatoes are £1.65 per 750g pack (about £2.20 per kilo), Waitrose are £1.49 per pack, but the pack is only 500g (so £2.98 per kilo). Waitrose's cheapest loose potatoes are 86p per kilo, ours are 60p per kilo. Our peppers are £3.50 per kilo, in Waitose they are £4.68. Even the avocados are 99p for small and £1.39 for large compared to our 90p (for what I think is large). In Waitrose the cheapest carrots, onions, lemons and apples cost exactly the same as ours.

There might be plenty of reasons to shop at a supermarket, but thinking the vegetables will be cheaper than the local deli should not be one of them.

This week’s Fruit and Veg

Thinking about the return of the pickled onions got me thinking about our wonderful seasonal fruit and vegetables*. The range changes quicker than I really expected it would. Spring was so exciting with all sorts of new things arriving every couple of weeks. We had English lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, spring onions, asparagus, raspberries, celery, broad beans, strawberries, courgettes, sweetcorn, plums, cherries, runner beans... And, even though we're well into autumn now, there are still new bits and pieces coming into season. This week it is the English broccoli. I'm going to try to list which vegetables we have available whenever something new arrives over the next few weeks.

This week we have:
Lots of Apples
Bramley
Cox
Jonagold Red
Royal Gala
Russet

Broccoli
Onions
Pears (Conference)
Potatoes
Pumpkins (Little Bear grown in Dorney)
Tomatoes

And a quick browse on our nearest supermarket's web site revealed all our prices are lower than theirs where I could find a comparable product! I couldn't find any fresh pumpkins or vine tomatoes sold by the weight rather than by the number of tomatoes. But where I could compare we are cheaper which I'm really pleased about.



* Though we started off selling just seasonal English fruit and veg (local where possible) we now also have imported bananas and citrus fruit.

May Day

Yesterday way May Day and the official start of the British Asparagus season. Right on schedule I took delivery of my first batch of local asparagus! Grown 3.5 miles from the shop and delivered within hours of being picked. You can’t get much fresher!