Late autumnDrying floor
Root crop dried and milled
The last of the root came off the field and went straight to low-temperature drying. Moisture landed inside spec on the first check, which does not always happen and saves a fortnight when it does.
Milled to the usual particle size and held for release testing. Bottles from this run carry the current crop year on the label.
Mid autumnCulture room
A ferment that would not start
One vessel sat flat for three days against an expected thirty-six hours. We held it rather than warming it through, which would have moved things along and produced something we could not stand behind.
It came round on the fourth day and released normally. Had it not, the batch would have been composted and this entry would say so.
Early autumnRelease bench
One batch held and destroyed
A microbial count came back above our release limit on a single batch. It was quarantined the same day and destroyed rather than reworked, and the input was traced back to a grower delivery.
Nobody received it. We are recording it because a limit you only hear about when it passes is not a limit.
SummerNorth fields
Wet season, smaller yield
Persistent rain cut the yield on the leaf crop by roughly a fifth against an ordinary year. Quality on test was unaffected; there is simply less of it.
That is the reason a line goes out of stock here rather than being topped up from somewhere else. When it is gone, it is gone until the next crop.
SpringSoil lab
Soil tested before anything was sown
Every field is tested before planting, for heavy metals as much as for nutrients, because extraction and concentration make whatever is in the ground more concentrated in the bottle.
One field came back marginal for cadmium and was left out of the rotation for the year.