IN VEG:
It’s good news and bad news this week. The bad news is that the extraordinary rain this week past has destroyed lots, if not most, of the local Sydney basin vegetables. The good news is that the season in Victoria has been fantastic and our growers down there feel they can supply most of what we may be short of. We have excellent supplies of cherry tomatoes on the truss this week, they are sensational to cook with and eat superbly and for this week, they are probably the cheapest tomato in our stores.
Also welcome in stores this week is the autumn harvest of Australian asparagus. If you have not tried our Grande bunches, you should! At first glance they appear to be very dear however, they are exactly double the size of our regular bunches and in fact, both are very similar in price once this is taken into account. Celery, all capsicums, midi cos lettuce, iceberg lettuce plus broccoli and Dutch carrots are all great value this week. Imperfect options, especially zucchini and kumera continue to be absolute bargains.
IN FRUIT:
Any product from NSW will have issues after this rain. For the most part, this is not where everything comes from and there won’t be a lot of problems with fruit but it’s not that simple for vegetables. Berries continue to be reasonably priced and good quality. Apples, pears, nets of passionfruit and grapes are all good value. Plums are really the only option I would choose in stone fruit - this week the Angelinos and Tegan Blues are superb.
Shepard avocadoes are now at their best and very inexpensive, this will continue for a couple of weeks. We have big problems with figs, many of which do come from NSW and have been decimated by the rain for now. Bananas look terrible after the mini cyclone up north however, that’s only skin deep and they are still eating very well. We have our last good KP mangoes for the season in store for the next 10 days or so and then a gap until late August.
