Tomato Club

NOW FULLY SUBSCRIBED!

We are pleased to announce membership details for this years' Harvest Season 2024. Please keep your eye on our social media channels and / or sign up for our newsletter for more updates .

Growing exclusive Heirloom & Heritage Tomato varieties has become our passion. We spend all winter searching far and wide for seeds of the tastiest varieties to enable us to offer the most varied and interesting selection of tomatoes for your culinary creations. Our focus is always on taste and colour rather than on yield, which is why we can offer such a fantastic range throughout the summer months and also explains why we are a little bit more expensive than our european glass-house growers on the continent.

Our exclusive Tomato Club is a fresh tomato subscription - a celebration of the wonderful fruit, sharing growing tips, variety choices and best of all; some fantastic recipes and serving suggestions for you to use with your tomatoes. 

We sell our subscriptions in 1kg boxes and you simply choose the frequency of collection, either 6 fortnightly boxes or 3 monthly boxes.

Each time you receive a new variety, you can search for that variety by searching in our tomato club members area, where you'll find an info card, describing the unique characteristics and features of that particularly variety. Every week we'll be posting new and exciting recipe / serving suggestions in the recipe section of our website.

This year in the tomato club, during our opening farm tour event, we’ll be learning about creating more plants from taking cuttings and also because we mainly grow heritage varieties, we’ll be learning about how we can save seed from this years crop and store them for growing next year.

The idea is that our members buy farm shares of our fantastic Tomato Season crops, whilst learning lots more about this versatile and much-loved Fruit and its vast variety of shapes, colours, sizes and flavour profiles.

For those of you who don't know much about the CSA farming model, it's essentially a way for farmers to interact directly with local families and individuals who are searching for the very best local and sustainable produce, grown in their area, (achieving hyper-low "field-to-plate" miles which is great for a healthy diet and can really make a difference to our collective carbon footprint), making the shortest possible food-chain. It's already very popular in the States and Canada but is becoming increasingly popular here in the UK too.

The benefit to the consumer is obvious; they receive their fair share of the very best seasonal local produce, which is picked at it's peak perfection, providing a higher quality product than any supermarket or wholesale-driven food chain can provide, all whilst knowing exactly where their food has come from, who's growing it and how it's being produced.

For the farmer there are benefits too, they can plan more precisely how much produce to grow, based on numbers of members who sign up and also they can spend more time dedicated to the task of farming, in-turn creating a better product, because they don't have to spend time or resource away from the farm, in delivering to markets / wholesalers and the associated marketing. 

If you would like to read and learn more about the benefits of the CSA farming model here in the UK, follow the "Community Supported Agriculture UK webpage link here for more info.

In Yorkshire we have quite a short production season (usually 3 months starting in August and ending in October), but our advantage being located so far North is that we get really long daylight hours during May and June which is just when the plants need all the daylight they can get to become healthy and strong to bless us with dozens of tasty and super sweet tomatoes.

Tomato sowing season kicks off in February for us, we sow over 50 varieties every year, starting off propagation inside heated grow beds, under LED lights, with a specific light-recipe for encouraging young seedling leaf growth. Once the risk of an overnight frost has passed (late April) we slowly move our small plants out into our large commercial polytunnel. It’s here that our plants are looked after by our unique and innovative aquaponics growing system.

Our beautiful rainbow trout provide a complete nutrient-rich fertiliser source, which the plants in-turn clean up ready to be recirculated back to our fish. By early August, our first fruits start to arrive, keeping us in plentiful supply right through until October.