 |
| A bird in the hand... isn't really worth two in a bush |
On Friday afternoon I was cruelly plucked from my serene vegetable garden with its slow rhythms of growth and placed in front of a complex spreadsheet which had to be completed in a few short hours. I had to contact several people by phone and email, not all of whom I had contact details for, and the internet at home was down. My body had forgotten what the stress hormone feels like.
I had innocently put my hand up with a few others when Katie had asked for people to be back-ups for her role as veg-bag scheme coordinator, but then I was the only one who turned up for the training, and now Katie's gone away for two weeks leaving me in charge. Well, in charge of sorting out what goes into the bags anyhow.
This isn't as easy as it might sound.
For starters, the six local growers (including me) who provide the veg are not producing enough at this early stage in the season to fill all thirty-eight bags so we have to buy in additional veg from an organic wholesaler. Also the local growers generally don't have enough of each type of crop to pop one in each of the thirty-eight bags – often they might provide only ten or twenty portions of, say, salad bags or onions. So not all bags can have the same stuff in them. The bags are divided into four groups and the aim is all those in one group to get the same veg (even that isn't always possible).
Then there are a few other rules which ended up seeming mutually incompatible:
- each bag should have seven or eight different types of veg
- each bag should have a good mix of leafy and bulky types of vegetables
- a group shouldn't have the same veg in their bag as last week
- no leafy stuff from the wholesaler as it wouldn't store well overnight (it's delivered on Tuesday)
(and crucially) – the total cost of the veg in each bag must be kept below a specified amount.
Oh and I neglected to mention that one of the four groups is for “small bag” customers, so they only get four different veg.
Although everyone delivers their produce on Wednesday, just prior to the packing, the orders have to be firmed up the Friday before because that's the deadline the wholesaler sets us. 4pm to be precise.
Christy*, who deals with all the veg-bag customers, had kindly allowed me to crash her kitchen and her WiFi to get it all sorted, and we ended up working on the spreadsheet together. Her previous experience as buyer for the shop at the Centre for Alternative Technology came in very handy, as she costed up portions of different types of veg in her head, and it's thanks to her that we managed to keep the costs under control. (“Strawberries? Too expensive!”) It did take us over three hours of brain-stretching to do it though. I was still getting texts from growers telling me what they could provide as late as 3:42pm which didn't help. So we missed the 4pm deadline by 45 minutes but I remembered Katie saying that the wholesaler would accept an early Monday morning phone call to place the order. We were OK. I just hoped they would still have in stock what we had chosen (mushrooms, apples, tomatoes and beetroot) - the thought of trying to rejig the spreadsheet again at short notice was not appealing! (It turned out they did).
My job wasn't finished though. On Monday I had to email out to all the customers telling them what they could expect in their bag this week. And this afternoon I'll be helping with the packing itself. The Environmental Health Inspector has chosen this day of all days to come and see, for the very first time, whether we are abiding by the rules. We're going to wear aprons and wash our hands and everything, in the hope that she's not going to shut us straight down. Fingers crossed.
* Not her real name
 |
| Somebody was giving a bath away, so I picked it up for the garden |
For starters, the six local growers (including me) who provide the veg are not producing enough at this early stage in the season to fill all thirty-eight bags so we have to buy in additional veg from an organic wholesaler. Also the local growers generally don't have enough of each type of crop to pop one in each of the thirty-eight bags – often they might provide only ten or twenty portions of, say, salad bags or onions. So not all bags can have the same stuff in them. The bags are divided into four groups and the aim is all those in one group to get the same veg (even that isn't always possible).
Then there are a few other rules which ended up seeming mutually incompatible:
- each bag should have seven or eight different types of veg
- each bag should have a good mix of leafy and bulky types of vegetables
- a group shouldn't have the same veg in their bag as last week
- no leafy stuff from the wholesaler as it wouldn't store well overnight (it's delivered on Tuesday)
(and crucially) – the total cost of the veg in each bag must be kept below a specified amount.
Oh and I neglected to mention that one of the four groups is for “small bag” customers, so they only get four different veg.
Although everyone delivers their produce on Wednesday, just prior to the packing, the orders have to be firmed up the Friday before because that's the deadline the wholesaler sets us. 4pm to be precise.
Christy*, who deals with all the veg-bag customers, had kindly allowed me to crash her kitchen and her WiFi to get it all sorted, and we ended up working on the spreadsheet together. Her previous experience as buyer for the shop at the Centre for Alternative Technology came in very handy, as she costed up portions of different types of veg in her head, and it's thanks to her that we managed to keep the costs under control. (“Strawberries? Too expensive!”) It did take us over three hours of brain-stretching to do it though. I was still getting texts from growers telling me what they could provide as late as 3:42pm which didn't help. So we missed the 4pm deadline by 45 minutes but I remembered Katie saying that the wholesaler would accept an early Monday morning phone call to place the order. We were OK. I just hoped they would still have in stock what we had chosen (mushrooms, apples, tomatoes and beetroot) - the thought of trying to rejig the spreadsheet again at short notice was not appealing! (It turned out they did).
 |
| Home sweet home. Or should that be, agricultural store sweet agricultural store |
* Not her real name
p.s. Apologies for the mix of left and centre justification. It's Blogger playing tricks on me - it just will not allow me to left-justify everything. Plus it won't place a photo where the cursor is, only at the top of the blog. It does this periodically but not all the time. If anyone else has had similar problems and knows how to beat it into submission let me know! I'm using Google Chrome.
No comments:
Post a Comment