News and Updates

Although we have a little time left we are approaching the end of the winter fruits.

The apples, especially the English Braeburns, have been very good and will continue to be so for awhile before they are replaced with the southern hemisphere fruit. The changeover will not happen for all the apples at the same time so you may experience a difference in texture, sweetness and general condition between the different varieties that we will offer. If you have any particular likes or dislikes please let us know.

English Comice, Conference and Concorde pears have been readily available and full of flavour but these will shortly be ending to be replaced initially by Williams pears from South Africa. These pears usually arrive in the country in a very hard condition and are often not ready for immediate consumption and if this is the case then we may replace them in your orders with other fruits.

The citrus fruit has also been very good but as you may have noticed we have now stopped using satsumas and are relying on clementines from Spain and Morocco. Over the next few weeks I think that these will be supplemented with Minneolas which last year were excellent. These will be followed by the satsumas, clementines and nadracotts fro m South Africa and Peru.

Both the red and white seedless grapes have been and still are superb. We are using predominantly Thompson as the variety for the white grape and Flame for the red. In the next couple of weeks we will have a black grape with seeds. We will not supply this unless requested, because of the seeds, but it usually is the best flavoured grape of all and in our opinion well worth trying.

Stone fruit has been more of a problem. Good peaches and nectarines have been in short supply and are now considered to be finished for the winter except for the air freighted varieties which we have to import via Holland and France making them particularly expensive. There should still be a good supply of Red plums and hopefully yellow will start soon . Apricots may also be at an end by the time you receive this update – we are just not sure yet.

If any one likes Lychees then now is the time to eat them. They are very good and very reasonably priced.

Three other fruits which may be of interest are the Blood oranges from Sicily (taroc Variety soon to be replaced by Moro) , large Navel oranges from Spain which are juicy and sweet but not so good for eating in an office and Ugli Fruit from Jamaica which along with ortaniques are probably the sweetest and juiciest of all citrus fruit.