IN FRUIT
All our summer fruits are now in full swing. All the stone fruit is now keeping well and most importantly eating well. We now have all our varieties of mangoes, Kensington Prides, R2E2s, Honey Golds and Calypsos in stock and ready to eat. We are in the process of winding up the Northern Territory fruit and moving across to Queensland for our December and January supplies. Honey Golds are one of the later mangoes and they will be still completely from the Northern Territory. The other varieties will change as the week goes on. Other great stone fruit lines this week are peaches and nectarines. My pick would be the white peaches this week. They are superb to eat and growing conditions are near perfect. The other fruit that loves this warm weather we are having is rockmelons currently from Central Queensland and we at Harris Farm this week have extremely large, tasty, well priced rockmelons in all our stores. Rockmelons are an extremely versatile piece of fruit. Great for breakfast, a snack or dessert. Nectarines usually come a little later than peaches and this year is no exception. That said we have some very good yellow nectarines and the small sizes particularly represent very good value. Seedless watermelon have come down in price dramatically and the quality here is superb too. The first of the summer raspberries are in our shops this week and the flavour is fantastic, these would definitely be my pick of the berries. We are seeing blackberries in the stores far earlier than usual. Plus now all the grapes are from Australia so just a few bits and pieces like lychees and plums are needed to round off the taste of summer in all our stores. Bananas remain extremely good value and heavy supplies of avocados from New Zealand and Western Australia continue to keep prices of this favourite fruit down low. Traditionally, early December was the best time for Australian cherries but now we have Tasmania in January but the same beautiful cherries from local areas such as Young are now in the stores and the better eating varieties are now being harvested. A small case of cherries is a great gift or a welcome addition to a summer feast or celebration.
IN VEGETABLE
Extreme hot weather over the weekend has tightened supply of local bunch lines and herbs from the Sydney basin. However, there are bargains to be had in most hard produce lines and definitely corn has dramatically fallen in price. Tomatoes of all types remain very reasonably priced as do most other salad lines.
