Green garlic in the post!

Introducing Farm Post - seasonal ingredients, delivered to your door.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Salt and the Earth, the newsletter that hopes to bring you a little closer to where your food comes from, every time you cook.

I’m Hugo, a cook and writer who adores cooking with the rhythm of the year. Every week as the sun glows, wind wanders and rain seems to spill from the sky everything around us is changing. We are on a planet that spins and, as our own lives rotate from day to day, the world around us is gently moving, too. This movement isn’t always reflected in the spaces we buy food, but it’s always present in the spaces where its grown. Strawberries are but a flower one week and many rotations of day and night later are a deep red and sugar-sweet fruit that just beams with ‘SPRING!’.

Strawberries at Maynards Fruit Farm, Kent.

The four seasons are pillars of the year but in reality there are dozens more - each producing ingredients in varying degrees of maturity and youth. I write about some of those seasons within seasons here but realise that, unless you have access to a local farm or are growing your own food, some of the ingredients that these micro-seasons boast are very hard to come by.

I want to remedy that - with Farm Post.

Farm Post - lettering by my wife, Hattie!

Farm Post is a physical version of this newsletter, arriving to your door, rather than your inbox. Over the year I want to ship a collection of incredibly seasonal ingredients to you, along with a recipe for each and thoughts on how to put it all to use at home, in your kitchen.

The first edition contains one of my favourite spring ingredients - green garlic. This is garlic in a spring onion-like state, before it has formed a real bulb and it’s trademark papery cloves. It’s not often sold at this stage in the UK, with growers usually opting to leave it in the ground until later in summer before tying bunches of bulbs and hanging them to fully dry.

Green garlic in it’s latter stages at Maple Farm, Suffolk.

Green garlic is sweet, fragrant, a little fiery and entirely edible - but more on that in Farm Post.

You can order your garlic and accompanying newsletter here - available until 12:00 on Monday 18th May and shipping later that week. This is a not-for-profit project and is being sold at cost price, with the aim of connecting as many kitchens as possible in the British Isles with these glorious seasonal flavours, all while supporting small-scale growers and their families. Huge thanks to Stonelynk Organics in East Sussex for their beautiful garlic, via Harry and Sam at Shrub.

Until the next one,

Hugo x