The Online Veg Box Shop is Now Open

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

This week, along with the usual gorgeous bouquets from our talented florists, we have applemint and sage plants in pots to grow on your windowsill or in your garden. These organic, locavore-grown herbs are gorgeous- which is why they’re sometimes included in our bouquets- but they’re also delicious. Make fresh applemint ice-cream by infusing a custard base with leaves- like in this La Grotta Ices recipe (this is the only time I’ll ever link to French Vogue) or include it in your tabbouleh or tzatziki. Brown butter is a classic partner for sage- that’s a pasta sauce in and of itself, or a dressing for any blanched green veg. You can also pair it with green beans, roast chicken, squash…

Get your organic potted herbs alongside your tins of beans, biodegradable binbags, tahini, miso, and whatever you need to make your veg box into a wonderful array of meals on the Online Veg Box Shop.

The deadline to get your orders in is 11pm Monday.

Headlines

Spring

A new sign of the season changing is that lockdown restrictions are easing- hooray! If you’ll be out and about more often now, you might need to think about how your veg box is delivered. If there’s a safe place to leave it, drop us an email. If you live in a block of flats or tenement, we can take a key to the close and leave your deliveries outside your flat door. Email us for the address. 

And if you’re planning to go away, remember that you can let us know up to 9am on Monday in the week you need to pause for. We greatly appreciate earlier notice, however, as it helps us order only the veg we need and avoid waste.

Meat

We’ve recently given our monthly meat boxes a makeover. They’re still full of organic high-welfare meat from Scottish farms, but now they offer more variety, with each month centering on a theme (while still including some perennial basics). June’s theme was charcuterie,  and July’s will be barbeques. We order our meat well in advance to make sure the farms can fulfil our orders, so if you’d like to subscribe to a meat box beginning in July, email now for more info and to check avaliability.

Send me your recipes!

If you’ve got a recipe you can’t stop cooking, something that makes the most of the season’s plenty, please send it to me at saoirse@glasgowlocavore.org. It might be featured in the newsletter, and you’ll get a bit of credit on your veg box account to say thanks if it is!

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

We have big changes coming up behind the scenes at Locavore, as we plan to switch to a new administrative system. I know those two words aren’t really among the most exciting ones you can read in a veg box newsletter (that would be ”radishes” and ‘cherries’). But trust me, this is gonna make everything about getting your boxes so much better, as it should help us massively cut down on admin and packing errors, as well as introducing a log-in portal so you can make changes to your account easily and directly. I’m so excited for these improvements- we’re not just growing bigger, we’re getting better, and that means we can make more of a difference.

We’re still in the early stages of planning, and we want your input. It’s really important to us that we make these changes with you and your needs in mind, so please fill out the systems survey here!

This is a survey just about the admin and making changes to your subscription- if you have any feedback on your boxes, their contents, and so on, please email us.

The other piece of news is much smaller- we’ve launched a new series on our website called (get ready for a very catchy title) What I Do With My Veg Box! In this series we share how our veg boxes fit into our real, busy lives. None of us are cookbook perfect- we make boring meals as well as exciting ones, make mistakes, and sometimes don’t manage to make perfect use of everything.

The first installment is lil ol’ me, with a lackluster cauliflower dinner and some really good cabbage meals. Read it here!

Impact Survey

If you’ve been shopping with us for a while, you might already know that we have been working with the Real Farming Trust and the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience on a project exploring our social impacts. Questions we asked in customer surveys last year included the reasons why people choose us, where else they shop, and what influences those decisions. During the first lockdown we ran a short survey asking how it was affecting activities like shopping and cooking, whether it was triggering other changes, and where Locavore fitted in. A year on, we’d like to invite you to take part in a follow-up survey which revisits some of those questions, exploring similar themes around how and why people shop with us, and asking what changes triggered by the lockdowns might have stuck, as well as asking for more general feedback on the experience of shopping with Locavore. The answers you give will help us continue to build our understanding of what’s important to our customers, as well as giving us pointers on what else we could be doing as we move into our next stage of development.  If you’d like to take part, you’ll find the surveyhere– and thank you!