FEATURE: Desperately Seeking Veg

As I’ve said before kicking the supermarket habit is something I’m working hard to do. One way I thought would make it easier would be to have my veggies delivered to my door.

I used to live in Norwich and as a student had a part time job in a wholefoods store which provided weekly local home deliveries of organic veg, fruit, bread, vegan dairy products, snacks, everything. This was nearly 10 years ago so I guess I thought that if Norwich did it 10 years ago then somewhere in Nottingham would do it now, right?

A little while ago I carried out a search on the internet for shops or farms in Nottingham who would bring the lovely organic veg to my door, found a few places and excitedly decided to give them a call. After a short time I started to understand how JR Hartley must have felt. In fact I don’t think he was looking for a copy of his book on fly fishing at all but just wanted to order an organic veggie box in Nottingham. Four of them told me “I’m sorry, we’re not doing that any more”.

A little despondent I decided to give up on the idea for a while but didn’t turn back to the supermarket. Instead I’ve been buying my veggies, fruit, dairy and lovely cakes from Spring Lane Farm, a local farm shop which sells some excellent produce. It’s not all organic but it's all local. If it doesn’t come from their own farm it’s from one of the neighbours’ or another nearby. After all, I'd rather buy local than organic from the other side of the world!

I know that there are a lot of places in Nottingham which do sell organic vegetables and after further investigation I have discovered a couple more organic veg box delivery schemes, mentioned below:

Rivernene Organic Veg – Although not strictly based in Nottingham they do deliver to the south of our county and in many other parts of the Midlands. Their website is brilliant, showing types of veggie box and a online ordering facility.

Eden Farms – This farm is in our neighbouring county of Leicestershire. They deliver to Nottingham including the Screaming Carrot Bakery where you can collect your veggie box.

I don’t want to be unfair to all of those fantastic shops in Nottingham such as Roots Natural Foods and Out of This World who stock a huge range of organic food including fruit and veg and I’ll certainly be writing about them in the near future. However, if anyone knows of a Nottinghamshire based farm/shop which delivers locally produced veggies I’d love to hear about them.

I can’t help but wonder why those farms/shops I called had stopped their organic veggie box delivery scheme. Perhaps businesses like these need more support from us Nottinghamshire people to make it viable? I’m making a pledge to try do more to support our local farms (especially organic farms) from now on.

Vicky
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