North/South Divide

We do a lot of growing here in Wales- mainly leeks and daffodils although we think Chris may be having a growth spurt.

We grow our leeks in North Wales and our daffodils along the coast in South Wales, this month the divide between North and South has never been bigger. Normally in February we’d be knee deep in Daffodils but this year the weather has wrecked all our plans for an early bumper harvest, and instead it’s the Leek crop in Flintshire that is blazing a trail.

Leek volumes are in fact up over 100% on 2009, with more of the crop than ever going over to England as the traditional leek growing counties in the east remain snow bound. Leeks are still doing really well here in Wales the “export trade” is way up, as Flintshire proves to have been an inspired choice for a major growing hub. Normally we’d be looking to pull about 30 tones of leeks every week, but over the last month that’s been more like 70 or 80 tones… with demand for UK grown fresh vegetables running at a 3 year high, and even Cornish crops damaged or slowed by the snow.

As you may have seen reported last week, our daffodil crop, based around Llantwit Major in Glamorgan is looking very sorry, with daily harvests 90% down on a year ago. We’ve decided to keep prices the same as last year, we are not looking to capitalise on the lack of our national flower, as we think it's really important to reward our customers and hope that you will support us when the large volume of the crop arrives later than we’d planned. We even had the television cameras here last week, keen to find out if there would be flowers for St David’s day, which we are still very confident there will be, but we are in need of a few warmer days to get the flowers to a decent height for picking

Meanwhile Charlie and the team in Flintshire will keep pulling….. having only lost 3 days in the very worst of the weather in January, they are set to break all Welsh leek records, and finish the crop in good time in late Spring, by which time the company is hoping it will have harvested its 20 million daffodils too

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