Seasonality

Agriculture depends a lot on environmental conditions, as we all know. There are crops suitable for different times of the year, and there are those that have a production cycle that is distributed throughout the growing year. From our point of view, respecting the season of each vegetable is crucial for our diet and nutrition.

Let's use the tomato as an example, a vegetable that plays a very important role in our gastronomy. Outdoors, tomatoes normally have a productive cycle between June and October (at the latest), if the minimum temperatures are stable and not too low. This means that, for the rest of the cycle, the tomatoes that reach the shelves of a grocery store come from greenhouses or are imported from areas with a different climate to ours. Naturally, it's less fresh and juicy than the tomatoes that reach us at the times we've mentioned. The same applies to cucumbers, peppers and eggplants, among others.

As well as these crops, there are others that are produced at a specific time, mainly in spring-summer, and which have characteristics that allow them to be stored throughout the year. We're talking, for example, about onions, pumpkins and potatoes. Onions, which can be produced at any time of the year, are widely exploited at the time of year that promotes the fastest results, between April and June, and are then placed in warehouses and stored there for several months. That's why it's rare to find fresh onions, especially with branches.

Pumpkin (a spring-summer crop), on the other hand, has an excellent storage capacity and, under the right conditions, remains practically intact for a year or more. Potatoes and sweet potatoes are relatively easy to store for 2 to 3 months, but without control they can quickly go bad, either due to water loss or, as in the case of normal potatoes, due to moths.

Then there are those crops that can be grown all year round, but which, due to production difficulties, are more expensive and difficult to obtain with the desired quality. In our case, this is more the case with cabbages, turnips, rocket and all the other plants in the brassica family, whose production is more complex in spring-summer due to the greater number of pests at this stage, which makes plant protection complex, especially when it's organic. The general rise in temperatures means that some insects, which are not active during the autumn-winter period, come back and feed on our plants. This rise in temperature can also lead to certain diseases appearing in the soil and on the leaves. This means that there is probably a greater need for plant protection at this stage.

There are also some plants that, in general, do well throughout the year - our favorites 😇 - and that are produced constantly, because there are no factors that prevent us from growing them.

So, to help you understand a little about our production and the availability of vegetables (at least ours) throughout the year, below is a table representing the stage of the year in which we grow our different crops.