Vegetable Box Crates – Update

It turns out maintaining our zero waste principles is complicated in a global pandemic. But here’s a little info on where we’re at with the latest spikes (and a highlighted yellow box below if you just want to get to the good stuff!).

Farm Stay and Farm Tours are all cancelled for the next six weeks. I know many of our veggie box subscribers were booked in to bring your families on a free farm tour over the next few weeks, and we’re hoping to do an online tour in a few weeks to hold you all over!

All our chooks and ducks are still laying eggs, and our veggies are still growing though, so our food is still heading out the door and into your bellies. Farm pick up is continuing with strict limits of 8 people in the Farm Shop at any given time. Deliveries are going out on Tuesday and Friday afternoons as usual. We are continuing to use our reuseable vegetable crates for delivering our organic vegetable boxes.

Reminder to please leave your crates out on the morning of vegetable delivery/pickup. We are using contactless delivery, so while we normally LOVE a chat, can you please keep interactions brief, and remain 2 metres away while Hannah delivers your veg and picks up your crate 🙂 You’ll also notice our whole team wearing reuseable cloth masks since the latest government advice came out. Don’t worry- we’re not sick. We’re just careful because we take your safety seriously.

All crates are sanitised when collected from your house and clean when placed into our van during our delivery run. Crates are then cleaned again at the farm and left untouched for at least 7 days. The scientific community suggests that COVID doesn’t survive on plastic surfaces for more than 3 days, but we have erred on the side of caution. Better safe than sorry!

Here are a few reasons we’re sticking with the crates:

1. Paper can’t be recycled indefinitely. So even with the best recycling program in the world (which we don’t have in Australia!), using paper bags means using resources. Yes, you can, and we do, compost them, but it’s still a tree being cut down, and if we can minimise our resource use, we believe we should.
2. Paper bags provide a worse experience for you, the customer. Vegetables are often damp or wet (especially with all the rain we’ve been having!) and they simply don’t mix well with the paper bags, no matter how thick. Paper bags that fall apart or impact the quality of the veg is no good for anyone.
3. Paper bags provide a worse experience for us as farmers. I’ve ranted about this before, and how un-ergonomic they are to pack. But we can also fit less in the van for a delivery run. And each eco paper bag is over 90c, so that’s less veg going in your box.
4. Why wouldn’t we? With cleaning, and a no-touch period, our reuseable crates are just as safe.

If you have any questions about our COVID procedures, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us. And should (when!) circumstances change in the future, you’ll be the first to know 🙂

We promised more videos, so here’s another one of our cute little duckies below!