Veg Boxes
***We are now taking expressions of interest for the 2025 season. Scroll down to the form below! ***
We supply a weekly ‘Share of the Harvest’ box of fresh & locally-grown vegetables, herbs, salads and wild edibles, every Friday, to homes & hubs between the Taf & Tywi rivers in West Carmarthenshire, Wales, from June to December.
Our boxes are designed to meet your weekly veg needs. We fill them with lots of variety, in line with the changing seasons and what is typical of the Welsh diet. It’s your chance to align your diet (and the microbes in your gut) with your local environment and the unpredictable nature of the Welsh climate!...
“ Our trip to collect our weekly box became the highlight of our week, filled with the excitement of what delicious surprises we’d have in our box! Speaking face to face, direct contact with the growers and suppliers: shopping local, shopping sustainably!”
What’s in a Veg Box?
Each week, you’ll receive an upcycled wooden pallet box or personalised organic cotton tote bag with 6-8 items of seasonal, freshly harvested leafy greens, root vegetables, herbs, salads and wild foods. You’ll also receive our weekly newsletter, the ‘Veggie Love News’, in which we share with you news from the garden, information about how we grow your vegetables, the values behind the project, as well as recipe ideas, cooking tips, plant folklore and lots of great food info from the peasants’ kitchen!
Throughout the year, the contents of your box will change with the seasonal nature of the Welsh harvest. In the Summer, it’ll be overflowing with juicy courgettes and cucumbers, succulent tomatoes & fresh herbs like basil, and as we move into autumn, pumpkins, sweetcorn, leeks and carrots start to fill your share. This is the freshest veg, with the shortest supply chain that you can get. We harvest it in the morning, and it’s in your kitchens by the evening!
“I love Fridays just that little bit more over the veg box season. Catching up with the Glasbren team and customers is always a treat. I get a great selection of locally grown produce and information that inspires and challenges me in the kitchen and keeps the family topped up with healthy organic goodness.”
With times of plenty and in leaner times, your veg box will change. You’ll find all the staples through the season - potatoes, carrots, cabbage, brussel sprouts - as well as some of the rockstar greens like kale, rocket, chard & spinach, to keep you topped upon vitamins! We grow a few weird & wonderfuls, too, so most weeks you’ll find yourself trying something new!
NB: Our veg boxes are guaranteed **PLASTIC-FREE**
How is it grown?
Our veg boxes are full of nutrient-dense, colourful, fresh and crunchy veg, full of essential vitamins and minerals and nothing but goodness for your body. Why? Well because of the way it’s grown!
We grow our veg using organic & agroecological principles, with nature. Not only does that mean no chemicals or artificial fertilisers, but it means we look to nature in the way that we build healthy soil, full of life, restore and regenerate ecosystems, create habitat and grow plants in beneficial relationships.
Your veg is grown from open-pollinated seed by the loving hands of our growing community, with laughter and passion, nurtured and harvested by hand and washed with natural Welsh springwater. It’s food with soul, with life and with a vibrant story of community and a deep care for our environment. We hope you can taste all of that in it!
Want to see for yourself? Join us on one of our volunteer days or come and visit the garden!
“The veg are fresh, local and tastier than anything you could buy from a shop. We love the feeling that our food is having a positive impact on the environment”
There are a few things we’re not able to grow on our site, but anything in your box not grown by us will be supplied by a Welsh organic farmers or one of our collective of One Planet, ecological growers in West Wales like One Planet Organics, C&M Organics and Sunrise Market Garden. We know them all personally and know that they hold the same values and use the same principles as us.
What Size Do I Need?
There are three main sizes of box to choose from. It’s up to you to decide which suits your needs best. Our feedback last year showed that our estimations were just about right according to how many people each feeds - unless you have a huge appetite, of course! To try to make our veg affordable and do our bit for a fair and equitable food system, we are now offering our boxes on a sliding scale - in other words, you pay what it realisitic for you within a range:
Small box (1 person) £13 - £16 per week*
Medium box (2-3 people) £18 - £21 per week*
Large box (4+ or veg lovers) £23 - £26 per week*
The big difference with Community-Supported Agriculture is that we ask members to pay for the 29-week season up-front. This supports us to prepare the ground, buy seeds and compost and cover costs early in the season, for a bumper harvest later in the year. For you, it’s a commitment to yourself to eat healthy, fresh, chemical-free and local veg all year. We find that it works really well for both us farmers and our members. We appreciate that it’s a big gesture of trust, but in return for your trust, we offer transparency, hard work and love and passion for the work that we do!
(*Multiply by 29 weeks for whole season price)
In 2024, we are moving to a much bigger site, and are building our market gardens up from scratch. Express your interest in becoming a member when we come back for the 2025 season on the form below!
ADDITIONAL BENEFITS:
Membership to our Essentials’ Trading Buying Group
FREE Access to our Online Courses & Cooking Resources
Members’ Only Seasonal Events & Celebrations
10% discount on our in-person workshops & courses
Optional extras from other local producers - free-range eggs, pasture-fed meat, bread and more.
When our CSA veg boxes return in 2025, we’ll be delivering to homes and hubs within a 10-mile radius of Lords Park farm in Llansteffan (see map below), including Llanybri, Llangain, Johnstown, St. Clears, Laugharne, Meidrim, Bancyfelin, Ferryside and the roads and country lanes in-between. We’ll have pick-up hubs in Llansteffan, Carmarthen and Kidwelly.
Keep an eye out for more information as we approach the new season, and do sign up below, or subscribe to our weekly newsletter to be the first to hear any updates.
What is Community Supported Agriculture?
“Community supported agriculture (CSA) is a radical approach to the production and supply of food that builds strong, close and mutually beneficial partnerships between communities and producers. CSA is defined as a partnership between farmers and consumers in which the responsibilities, risks and rewards of farming are shared.”
The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model offers a radically new kind of relationship between consumers and producers based on mutual trust, transparency and building a better, kinder, more resilient food system.
Joining as a member is about far more than just a weekly veg box subscription. It’s the chance to to know your growers and EXACTLY where your food comes from, to come and get your hands in the soil & learn about food growing & sustainability.
It’s discounts on weekend workshops. It’s members’ only Open Days. It’s recipe ideas, cooking tips, nutritional info and the chance to broaden your culinary horizons & improve your health. It’s an introduction to herbalism, foraging & the healing world of plants & what small-scale, local & regenerative farming can look like.
It’s an invitation into a welcoming, inclusive, open & exciting community of folk gathered around a table or a smoking fire. It’s transparency, peace of mind, healing & a resilient, reliable food supply no matter what COVID or any other crisis throws at us next.
It’s the chance to reimagine how we buy food, how we value it and our relationship with the people & land that grows it. We think that makes it a pretty special and unique experience.
Community Supported Agriculture is also about mutual aid and solidarity, building resilience within our communities. For us, part of that is our Solidarity veg box scheme, which we’ve been developing in partnership with the Landworkers Alliance Community Resilience pilot, the TGrains project at UWE Bristol and our local charities sharing the harvest with low-income and food insecure households and trying to make this kind of food more accessible to all.
We have relationships with other local, organic producers that allows us to offer you a one-stop shop for your groceries. We offer pasture-fed meat and free range eggs from Ange & Col here at Bronhaul Farm, and we can help you with where to source other items from local, regenerative suppliers. We’ve also set up a buying group for Essential Trading Workers’ Coop, who supply bulk, wholesale organic products - nuts, seeds, flours, oils and vinegars, eco cleaning products and much more. Buying in bulk makes ethical, organic products much more affordable and helps to significantly reduce waste too. Get in touch to find out more.
Some More FAQs
Q. “I grow my own vegetables at home. How will what’s in the box differ from what I’m growing?”
As our veg boxes are full of hyper-seasonal, local produce, the best of what’s growing in this region of Wales at any given time, it’s likely that it will be similar to some of the things you are growing in your garden. But, as we’re commercial, experienced growers, growing on a larger scale, we can often offer more variety and consistency that is possible in a home garden or allotment, so our veg box can be the perfect acompanient. We also take care of things like potatoes, cabbages, carrots and other field crops that are difficult to produce self-sufficiently on a home scale. Saying that, if you grow on a sizeable scale at home, and produce alot of vegetables through the main cropping season (June-December), this service possibly won’t be for you.
Q. “What happens if I’m away on holiday, or can’t pick up my box?”
Membership to a CSA is a commitment for the whole season - which means that we are unfortunately unable to refund your box if you are away, or can’t pick it up. We we can offer is flexibility around when you pick it up, though, and can accommodate changes to where you pick it up. Members will often arrange for a friend, relative or neighbour to pick up their box if they are unable to, while some donate their box for that week to our solidarity scheme, supporting low-income households experiencing food insecurity. In some rare cases we can arrange for your box to be made up on another day of the week with plenty of prior notice.
Q. “Can I request changes to the contents of my veg box?”
We have made the conscious decision not to offer a choice of items. This is because the nature of growing seasonally, with the Welsh elements and in line with nature means that every week is different in the garden! This is your chance to eat with nature, with the realities of your local environment. It offers the experience of growing your own, without the work and stress! It’s a new and exciting way to eat and will change the way you look at food forever. Though it is possible you’ll get sick of kale, it hasn’t happened for us yet! To step out of the seasonal offering would mean importing un-seasonal veg from abroad, at greater cost to you and to the planet.
In the case of allergies or intolerances to particular vegetables or plant groups, we can accomodate small changes within the choice available from the seasonal harvest at the time. Please let us know if you have any.
Q. “How can I get more involved with the veg growing?”
We offer weekly volunteer days, every Thursday between 9.30am and 4pm. They are lively days, welcoming and inclusive, and a great chance to learn more about permaculture, regenerative agriculture and ecological growing methods, as well as meeting new people and bathing in the healing balm of birdsong. It can be very satisfying to feel like you’ve had a hand in growing the vegetables in your veg box. You can find out more here. We are also offering seasonal Open Comunity Days on Saturdays throughout the year here at the farm. Scroll up for more details.