Twenty-five kilos of flour is more flour than you think.
The end of a patch is a parcel, and the parcel is the part people most often misjudge. So here is the honest account of what turns up, how much of it there is, when it comes, and what to do with it before it goes stale in a cupboard.
Every patch, and what comes back from it.
| Patch | What arrives | How much that is | When | Keeps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spring or winter barley | 44 to 52 bottles of Hawkstone lager | Two cases and a bit. Age-restricted | From November, once it is brewed and conditioned | Best before is about twelve months |
| Winter wheat | 25kg of stoneground wholemeal flour | About forty large loaves | Three postings: September, December, March | Three months from milling, so it comes in three |
| Durum wheat | 10kg of dried pasta | Roughly a hundred portions | From October | Two years, comfortably |
| Oats | 8kg of rolled oats and a box of oatcakes | Porridge every day for about three months | From September | A year |
| Potatoes | Three 12kg sacks | Thirty-six kilos. This is a lot of potatoes | Within a week of lifting, October | Six to eight weeks somewhere dark and cool |
| Oilseed rape | Six 500ml bottles of cold-pressed oil | A year of cooking | From September | Twelve months unopened |
| Echium | Two 100ml bottles of cold-pressed echium oil | Not for frying. For finishing | From October | Six months, refrigerated after opening |
| Hedgerow | Four jars of blackberry jam, and the survey | A year of toast | From October | Two years sealed |
| Wildflower | Two jars of honey, and the counts | Honey does not go off | From September | Indefinitely, though it will crystallise |
| Market garden | A box a fortnight, May to October | Twelve boxes across the season | Fortnightly, in season | Days. That is the nature of vegetables |
What to do with twenty-five kilos of flour before it turns.
The most common complaint about a patch is not the crop. It is the volume, arriving all at once, in a flat.
What is in the box
Ordered by what goes off first. Leaf before root, always.
What that makes
- A loaf, every other day, for a month Twenty minutes of work, most of it waiting · Wholemeal flour, 25kg Wholemeal from a stone mill drinks more water than shop flour. Start at seventy-five per cent hydration and expect a denser crumb, because that is what wholemeal is.
- Oatcakes, which take eleven minutes Eleven minutes · Rolled oats, 8kg Oats, hot water, salt, a little fat. Roll thin, bake hard. There is no third ingredient worth adding.
- Pasta with almost nothing on it Fifteen minutes · Dried pasta, 10kg, Cold-pressed rapeseed oil The point of making pasta from a named field is to taste the wheat, which you cannot do underneath a ragu.
- Thirty-six kilos of potatoes, realistically The whole of November · Potatoes, 36kg Roast, mash, dauphinoise, soup, and then give a sack to a neighbour before the last one goes. Everybody underestimates this and everybody does it once.
- Jam on the good bread Four minutes · Blackberry jam, Wholemeal flour, 25kg Both from patches within about forty metres of each other, which is the only genuinely satisfying thing on this page.
Fallowing. Tick something and we will find you a dinner.
Why the flour comes in three parcels.
Stoneground wholemeal has the germ still in it, the germ contains oil, and oil goes rancid. Three months is the honest shelf life and anybody telling you otherwise is selling roller-milled white and calling it wholemeal.
So the mill takes your twenty-five kilos, mills eight of them in September, eight in December and nine in March, and the rest sits as grain in the shed where it will keep for years. Three parcels instead of one costs us about eleven pounds in postage and saves you seventeen kilos of rancid flour.
It is the sort of decision that is obvious once somebody has explained it and invisible until they do.
Free UK delivery over £40
Flat £8.50 below. Nine in ten orders land within two days.
Fewer boxes, less carbon
We will hold an order back a day to ship it as one.
Carded on drink
Age verified at checkout and again on the doorstep.
Thirty days to back out
Non-food only, unless it arrived faulty, in which case tell us.
Arrival, questioned.
The flour, no, for the reason above. Everything else, yes, and you can nominate the week.
Change the address in the account until the week before each dispatch. The potatoes are the only one with a genuinely tight window.
Yes, at the price you paid, against anything on this site. That is a credit for goods, not a refund, and it never converts to cash — for the reason that runs through every page in this family.
Photograph it, tell us within fourteen days, and it is replaced. We are not asking you to post twelve kilos of broken potatoes back across the country to prove it.
The record of where it came from.
Every event on your patch, in order, hashed.
