Veg Box Newsletter 16th November: what do you think?

The Online Veg Box Shop is Open!

The Online Veg Box Shop is open for deliveries next week!

This week we’ve added our selection of festive goods to the Online Veg Box Shop! If you celebrate Christmas, this is your chance to stock up on treats from mince pies to panettone. We have lots of gluten-free and vegan options too, to make everyone in your household happy. We’ll have more options coming soon, but we have limited stock in everything so I would recommend snapping what you need up now. 

From the foragers, we have winter chanterelles gathered in Sweden and brought over by road. These are lovely wild mushrooms you’ll want to combine with butter or cream, or fry in olive oil with lots of garlic for a wonderful lunch. 

Remember the deadline to get your orders in is now 11pm Monday for everyone!

Headlines

Covid 19

Cases of Covid-19 are, sadly, on the rise in Scotland. As such we will continue to do out part to keep all our wonderful staff and customers safe. This means we’ll be continuing to practise contactless deliveries, so please keep half an ear out for your veg box on your delivery day. Remember that if you’re worried about the box being left on your doorstep, you can always leave a large plastic box for veg, milk, eggs, and whatnot to be left in to keep it sheltered and hidden. 

We’re also sorry to say we won’t be able to reintroduce our opt-out lists any time soon. We know you’re missing them- we are too. Unfortunately, they require a full staff in our packing shed, which would make socially distanced working for our packers impossible. We’re looking at ways to adapt for the future, but for the next month or two at least I’m afraid opt-out lists will still be suspended. 

All that said, it’s important to note that we don’t expect to see any issues with supply lines over the next months, so please don’t worry. We usually have boxes full to the brim with tasty local root veg and squash over the autumn and winter months, and while the pandemic may continue to have an impact on veg prices we think this is unlikely to matter much to our veg boxes. We thank you for your patience with us as we’ve learned how to deliver veg boxes through a pandemic. 

You can read about changes made to our service due to the pandemic here

Phone Hours

If you need to get in touch with us, the best way is generally to email us at this address. We now also have a phone helpline during limited hours: 9am-12pm Monday-Friday and 2pm-4pm Wednesday-Friday. Please note that as we’re working from home we aren’t able to answer the phone at other times. Unfortunately, our colleagues in the Locavore shop aren’t generally able to help with veg box enquiries, so if you can’t get through to us, the quickest way to hear back is usually to email. 

Recycling and Reusing Packaging

Just a reminder of what we collect from your door each week: 

Veg Boxes– we reuse these
Mossgiel Milk bottles – we return these to the dairy for reuse
Ed’s Bees jars – we return these to Ed (and his bees) for reuse
Plastic bottle lids – we recycle these
Plant pots from Locavore potted herbs- our farm reuses these
Locavore hummus Vegware pots – we return these to vegware to be biodegraded
Ella’s Kitchen baby food pouches – we recycle these
Toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes– we recycle these

We aren’t able to accept glass bottles, egg boxes, or any other items for recycling, I’m afraid. Most councils will recycle both of these items- in Glasgow, egg boxes can go in the recycling bin outside your flat, but glass may need to be taken to the bottle bank.

In the Veg Boxes This Week

Subject to last minute changes

Check out storage guidance for helpful tips and tricks on how to prolong the life of your fresh produce. If you’re wondering where your veg comes from, have a look at these maps. You can also join your fellow subscribers over in the Facebook group for lots of tips, tricks, and recipe ideas!

To contact us, ring 0141 378 1672 or email us at subscribers@glasgowlocavore.org

Click here for Veg Box Contents

The Nice Bit

Yesterday we launched our annual Big Survey, which is your chance to have a say. Our veg boxes are our veg boxes- that means you, too. We know there’s plenty of work to do to make our service as good as it can be, and the survey helps us to do this. We use the survey when we work with the Locavore growers to plan the next year of produce, when we decide who to work with, and what to work on, what to stock on the Online Veg Box Shop and what veg to maybe leave out of the boxes for a week or two. 

We had an amazing response to last year’s survey, and after the strange and difficult months we’ve had since then, we’re especially eager to hear your thoughts. We’ve grown a great deal this year, but also faced a lot of problems and changes, some of which, like the suspension of the opt-out lists, aren’t exactly what we wanted. While the last time I sent out this survey I was in our still-new Veg Box HQ in Bellahouston Park, I’m now on my sofa; my colleagues are not in the same room but across the city. Despite this, we are excited to keep going and growing, improving and developing what we do. We expect to make some fairly big changes to how things work- at least behind the scenes- around here soon, and it’s important to us to make those changes with all of you in mind, so that we can keep working towards embodying the values of the Locavore community. We want to hear from you whether you’ve been with us since the beginning or since last week, whether you get in touch often or never have. 

Oh, and you could win two weeks of your veg box free, too- just pop your email address in the last question if you’d like to enter the raffle.

Fill out the Survey