Category: shop

Your root to health

We still have lots of amazing tasty nutrient dense organic local roots, but there is only a few days left to get what we think are the tastiest local chunky carrots around grown in rich Red Devon soil from award winning farm Shillingford Organics. We will have Bishops farm parsnips and Shillingford Organics tasty swedes, potatoes & beetroot still for a while.
Whether mashed, roasted, chipped, stewed, soup, steamed or grated raw, all can be cooked with their skins left on.
Many essential nutrients are concentrated in the skins of roots and eating fruits and veg unpeeled whenever possible grown from healthy soils is great for gut health. Peels are a rich source of fibre, vitamins, minerals, micro nutrients and antioxidants making the skin one of the most nutritious parts of the plant. Because they’re grown without chemicals, they can simply be washed and cooked.
Non – organic carrots are one of the most heavily sprayed crops today and just washing fruit and veg is not enough to remove wax coating, insecticides, herbicides or fungicides readily used on crops such as carrots so it is wise to soak them in baking soda and water for 15 mins before scrubbing well or peel them but I doubt pesticides can ever be removed.
Healthy organic soils rich in soil Carbon are teaming with a diversity of life, the soil food web of life is where trace elements and minerals are made available to the plant in a soluble form by soil life or traded via soil fungi directly into plant cells in return for carbohydrates/sugars, this process is suppressed under non organic industrial farming methods and why non organic sprayed food is partly lacking in essential nutrients which has been well documented. Also modern plant breeding of vegetable varieties that are bred to crop at the same time, look the same, same shape, same size to fit the supermarket cosmetic requirements can only be achieved by inbreeding and narrowing of genetic diversity at the cost of plant nutrition. Missing nutrients in veg is replaced by water.
The photos show organic roots stocked by Harvest with character of all colours, shapes and sizes. The practice of grading out mountains of veg and left on the field to rot because of tight supermarkets cosmetic controls is wrong and a waste of good food. Good for health, eat the rainbow of colours

Potatoes. Spuds. Tatties.

What does every one know about how spuds are grown and how crop Desiccation occurs prior to harvesting in this modern age of Agriculture ? Long gone are the days of picking them up by hand behind the old potato digger on big farms. As ever Industrial Agriculture forged ahead in the chemical direction not thinking about nature, soil degredation or peoples health. The more the mechanisation, the more the compromises and chemical applications. Harvest Workers Co-op organic farm shop  only sells Organic potatoes, all from Devon at this time and all really tasty varieties grown in soils teaming with life which attract so much wildlife to those farms.

Under intensive industrial methods, many potato crops are desiccated just before harvesting using weedkiller. How does anyone know if the potatoes have been sprayed or not on the supermarket shelves? they all look the same side by side. there’s no traceability or information on that. Other crops that are commonly desiccated around the globe in the same way are wheat, soya, oil seed rape, oats, peas, beans. The practice of Desiccation is prohibited under organic certification but as organic farmers know, chemicals are harmful to soil life which they depend on to build soil fertility. Here is a link to Wikepedia explaining Desiccation