The growers

Nineteen farms. Names on every ticket.

We buy direct, pay on delivery and print the grower's name on the ticket. This page is the long version: who they are, how they grow, and why the produce tastes like it does. No sermons, just agronomy.

Rosa at the zinc counter writing the morning's price tickets with a fat black marker.

Who grew your dinner

Three of the nineteen farms and workshops on the sheet this season. Names on every ticket, because you should know whose soil is on the carrots.

Meg Turrell carrying a crate of soil-covered carrots through a frosty field at first light.

Hollow Creek Organics

Redvale flats · 38 miles

Meg Turrell · roots and brassicas

Meg lifts her carrots after the first hard frost, on purpose. Cold nights push the plant to convert starch into sugar to protect itself, so a winter carrot from Hollow Creek eats sweeter than anything pulled in autumn. The soil stays on until you buy it. Scrubbed carrots lose their skins' protection and go soft a week faster, so the sink is your job, not hers.

Tuesdays and Fridays: carrots, cavolo nero, savoy, beets

Sam Okafor cupping a cluster of oyster mushrooms fruiting from a straw column in the grow room.

Two Bridge Mushrooms

The railway arches · 3 miles

Sam Okafor · oysters and shiitake

Sam fruits oyster mushrooms on pasteurised straw under the railway arches, eight days from pinning to harvest. Everything we sell is first flush, when the caps are thickest and the stems still snap. Second flushes are thinner and drier, so they go to the deli stockpot instead of the shelf. Picked the evening before, on our tiles by six.

Daily except Sundays: oysters, shiitake, lion's mane

Ken Ito lifting a timber press box of fresh tofu from a steaming vat in his workshop.

Eastmill Tofu Works

Eastmill · four streets over

Ken Ito · third-generation tofu maker

Ken soaks whole soybeans overnight, grinds them at four and sets the curds with nigari, the mineral salt his grandfather used. Pressed in timber boxes, never extruded, so the block holds a curd structure you can see when you tear it. What he presses at five is on our counter at seven, still faintly warm through the paper.

Every morning: firm and silken blocks, yuba on Fridays

The person doing the buying

Rosa ran restaurant kitchens for eleven years before she ran our counter, and she buys like a cook: taste first, yield second, story third. If a line goes on the wall it is because she would cook it at home that night, not because the margin looked good.

Walk the whole store

A bunch of heirloom carrots with soil still on them, lying in a zinc scale pan on the tiled counter.

The honesty board

Curation is not markup. Once a month we walk a basket of staples through the two biggest chains and print the result on the board. When we lose a line, we print that too.

ORGANIC RETAIL AUDIT · EACH SPRING

An independent auditor walks our sourcing paperwork once a year. Placeholder chip: your real scheme goes here.

PAID ON DELIVERY · SINCE DAY ONE

Growers invoice at the door and are paid before the produce sells. Demo claim; bind to your real policy.

ZERO-WASTE COUNT · WEIGHED WEEKLY

Unsold food goes to the community fridge and the stockpot before the compost. Sample program description.

Staples, checked against the big chains

Walked and re-priced the first Tuesday of every month

Sample basket, demo figures. The live board is re-checked monthly.

Staple

Ours

The chains

Oat milk, 1L

$2.40

$2.20

Firm tofu, 300g

$2.90

$3.50

Dried chickpeas, 1kg

$4.10

$4.60

Rolled oats, 750g

$3.20

Seasonal greens, bunch

$3.90

$4.80

Shelves of preserves and ferments in glass jars with kraft labels, a card reading local hanging from one bracket.

The local shelf program

One shelf, nineteen makers within an hour of the door, stocked on terms that pay them before us. Ferments, hot sauce, preserves and miso from people who bring the jars in themselves and restock by hand.

Garnet Lane Ferments · small-batch kimchi and kraut
Redvale Orchard Preserves · marmalade from the flats
Arch Eleven Hot Sauce · fermented next to the mushrooms

Taste the difference the sheet makes

The best introduction to any of these growers is a Tuesday morning visit, an hour after their vans leave.

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