Scarcities

Am I alone in liking to buy fruit and veg in season? - remember the days when you could buy strawberry punnets by the roadside and it felt like the summer was finally here. I hate those nasty imported berries; no taste, no colour and wouldn't care if I had to pick my own from the farm.

Absolutely MOnica! I was fascinated to watch the huge machines used to harvest cauliflowers. It moved over the field, cut the cauli, cut off the excess leaves and out of the back they came bagged and boxed and were taken off by the supermarket transport. Sure that cabbages will be done in the same way. No sleep lost in our family either! Have to say that home grown veg does have the edge though!

If the farmers cannot pick their labour intensive crops they will find other crops to grow, or farm machinery manufacturers will develop machinery that can pick the previously labour intensive crops. Cabbages are a classic example of a crop that it should be easy to crop mechanically and potatoes already are cropped by machine and not dug up by hand.

I think any shortage will be short term as suitable machinery will soon be developed. Many technological advances are the result of crises like the one you envisgae.

I will not be losing any sleep over it!

We don't have a huge garden and have used trees as our boundaries and grown as cordons. We have Damson, plum, greengage, morello cherries, apples of all kinds and pears. Over the tops of some of the cordon we have blackberries trained on wires. We have strawberries and blueberries in raised beds. We have a small greenhouse for tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers and two large raised beds for salad crops and vegetables like carrots and beetroot. We use other spaces to set down bags in which we grow space hungry stuff like potatoes, beans, courgettes etc. DDIL and DS grow madly too and have space for a big poly tunnel and keep bees as well. DD has a tiny garden and does 'square metre gardening' in raised beds. DS in a flat uses the balcony and window boxes and hangs containers on the wall and does really well with it all. Cousins all grow stuff in pots. We all freeze, bottle, jam, pickle and make chutney. We swap and do extra for each other whenever we can. It is really only the way in which we all used to live anyway and we eat well! We don't worry about food we just get on and grow it.

Asparagus is a luxury whichever way you look at it and nothing tinned is as good as home grown foodstuffs. Do you have a garden Alexa ? If not take a look at verticalveg.org.UK and be inspired! It is truly amazing how much food you can grow for yourself in a very small space. I am a great believer in positivity and doing what you can for yourself whenever possible. If it is survival you are thinking of I don't think that asparagus should even be on the list.

If we have to import cabbages because the Norfolk farmers are forced out of business we will have to pay a lot more for simple cabbages, and potatoes and soft fruits, and apples and so on and so on.

/blogs.exeter.ac.uk/exeterblog/blog/2016/09/19/who-picked-british-fruit-and-veg-before-migrant-workers/

I really don’t think anybody needs to start panic buying!

Oh really !

I would stock up on nothing because we always have to adapt and move on to use what is available so I have no thoughts about it at all
Anyway Brexit has happened yet (?)

As Sainsburys only stocked Icing Sugar produced in France yesterday, I might have to find an alternative supermarket when I make cakes, or is all Icing Sugar now sourced from France?
What’s wrong with British sugar then?

I do not think circumstances will be that bad, just that crops which are labour intensive to crop, mainly soft fruit and some vegetables will be in shorter supply, more expensive or replaced with imports.

Tinned asparagus is a completely different vegetable to fresh asparagus. Like tinned peaches and fresh peaches.