delivery – Blog Greenearthorganics

We are delighted to announce that our 2024 Christmas Shop is now open and accepting orders for Christmas week.

We have a wonderful selection of Christmas Veg Boxes, Chocolates, Wines, Gift Vouchers and an array of other Organic Christmas Goodies! Check out some of the highlights of our Christmas offering below and detailed instructions on how to smoothly place your Christmas order through our online store. If you would like to celebrate local Irish organic food this Christmas, and support local organic Irish farms, and keep chemicals off your Christmas dinner plate, and be blown away my the amazing tastes and flavour of freshly harvested vegetables, then one of our Christmas boxes is exactly what you need. These boxes are jam packed full of as much Irish organic produce as we could get our hands on from our farm and other small Irish organic farmers. From our own amazing parnsips, to organic brussels sprouts grown right here in Galway to fantastic floury potatoes, to carrots that taste like carrots used to taste! These boxes for your Christmas order will be delivered direct to your door anywhere in Ireland on the 23rd of December as fresh as can be and exactly in time for your Christmas preparations. Read on for more info. Please get our order in as early as possible to ensure availability and to help us planning our harvest and harvest from our other Irish farmers. Christmas Order Cutoff & Delivery Days As Christmas Day falls on a Wednesday this year, we’re delivering a little differently so that everyone will receive their organic goodies in time for the festive celebrations!

We will be delivering as normal from Monday 16th December to Saturday 21st December. You can order a regular delivery for this week. CHRISTMAS BOXES WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR DELIVERY ON THESE DATES.
We will be running a dedicated Christmas Delivery run on Monday 23rd December. All Christmas Boxes and regular items can be ordered for delivery on this day. Orders must be placed by 10am on Friday 20th December. Early ordering is advised to ensure we can fulfil your order, and it helps us with harvesting and planning.

Order Process for Christmas Deliveries

Once Off Orders: You can navigate to our full Christmas selection here. Our four set Christmas boxes can only be ordered for delivery on 23rd December. You can order any items in addition to the Christmas boxes from our regular store for Christmas delivery. There are a few exceptions that are mentioned below. When placing your Christmas order you will see the Order Type option at checkout for ‘Christmas Delivery 23rd December.’ Make sure this is ticked if you are ordering for Christmas. It will be pre-ticked if you have a Christmas Box in your order. Restricted items – some items such as milk and yoghurt will not be available for delivery on 23rd December. There are also certain seasonal items like Irish broccoli that you cannot order for Christmas week as they will not be in season by then. Any of these items will be automatically removed from your cart at checkout.

Subscription & Repeat Order Customers: If you are due a delivery on the week of 16th December, your order will be shipped as normal. If you would like a Christmas delivery please do not try and place your Christmas order through your account – this will not be possible. Please log out of your account and place your Christmas order as a one-time GUEST order. Even though you will be prompted to log in at checkout with your email address, please do not log in. We are closed from Tuesday 24th December until Monday 6th January. There will be no deliveries during this period so please stock up before then! For repeat order customers, your order will be automatically skipped these weeks and it will restart on the week of 6th January. If you have any questions about how to set up an order for Christmas week or how to manage your recurring orders over the Christmas period, please send our customer care team an email on info@greenearthorganics.ie or give them a call on 091 793 768 / 01 460 0467.

Last year at the end of June I asked for your help, and I was humbled by the level of support we received. It is always with a great sense of irony that we head into July. It is the official end of the hungry gap. We are catapulted from a frenzy of farming activity and a dearth of harvest in early June to a level of activity bordering on the insane and an overflowing harvest basket. July is the time when we have a plentiful harvest, and it is the very same time that many of you break your routine with cooking. The last year has been difficult for all, and we all need a break, a break from the routine and lockdowns.

This summer is proving to be the biggest challenge yet. We have increased our planting rates; we have developed relationships with other local organic farms and now when the time of Irish plenty arrives we find that you our customers are leaving us for all the usual reasons, holidays, not cooking, routines out the window and we understand completely. But the downturn this summer for us has been sharp and severe over the space of three weeks we have seen the level of ordering drop off dramatically, this is leaving us with so much surplus harvest with nowhere to go but back into the ground.

This time of every year we also see a large increase in labour costs as we are now up to 11 people on the farm (all local lads this year which is amazing) and we have also hired many new packing staff to cover the extra work over the last few months and to cover holidays. It is a double downturn for us, as our costs go up dramatically and our sales go down dramatically. Anybody will tell you this is not a good way to run a business. The initial start of this growing season on our organic farm, seeds, plants, fertiliser (organic), compost, contractors and labour are very high, before you harvest even one bean. All of this is necessary to make the food in the fields happen.

Growing food at the best of times is not a money-making enterprise, far from it, we only ever expect the farm to break even and most years this is a stretch to achieve. We grow the food, because we love to do it, because sustainable agriculture is something we strongly believe in. We have PV cells generating our electricity, we have just invested in our first zero emission electric van, we collect our rainwater, we plant trees, and hedgerows, we use only plastic free packaging. We educate people on how important biodiversity is, and to get everybody involved in thinking about the planet and the environment, where our food comes and how it is produced is our critical philosophy.

All of this takes time and energy, it all costs money and at the end of the day although everybody wants to enjoy their job and although nearly everybody that works with us believes in our values and our mission, they still need to get paid.

So this is a plea, a plea to ask you to order next week, to find a way (if you can at all) to continue supporting us over the summer, to tell your friends and family to order from us, or if you can’t to pay your box forward to our Charity (Foodshare Kerry), just order a charity box online that we top-up with extra produce from the farm.

The boxes this week are loaded with the most amazing fresh local Irish organic produce, including, spinach, salad, lettuce, romanesco, cucumbers, kale, scallions, some even have new IRISH organic potatoes. The weather is meant to be hot so we figured a good helping of salad would be very much appreciated. So please if you can at all do order. Your support as always is very much appreciated.

Thank you!

Kenneth

PLACE YOUR ORDER HERE

Our Christmas Shop is OPEN

A Plea