Hedon Salads
T: 01430 441552Hedon Salads Ltd
Leading The Way. We are a leading grower and supplier of fresh, top quality produce in the UK.
Home > News > Winter Growing Campaign
Winter Growing Campaign
TESCO WINTER GROWING CAMPAIGN – BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Growing Salad through winter is now within the grasp of British farmers says supermarket Tesco.
After successfully trialling the first commercially viable UK grown winter cucumbers in 2003 Tesco’s are now receiving 20% of their Winter Cucumbers from a UK source based in East Yorkshire.
The breakthrough follows a huge investment of £3.7m by Hedon Salads Ltd, the UK’s largest independent producer of cucumbers.
Said Hedon managing director Tom Salmon: “Until recently it’s not been worth horticultural UK growers carrying on through the winter because the equipment needed was just too expensive.
“A few years ago we heard about winter production in Norway and Finland which had started in the mid-90s and we decided to investigate further.
“We visited a few sites and were amazed at how production costs had dropped. The most important thing was the affordable lighting.”
When Tom returned he set about installing lights in his glasshouse. But in order to get an even spread of light he had to physically raise the height of the greenhouse by 1.6 metres.
This involved lifting 17 acres of glasshouse millimetre by millimetre - some 50,000 panes of glass were lifted to a new height over 1.6m higher than it had been previously.
Added Tom: “We already had a combined heat and power plant on site which we built five years ago this generates waste heat and CO2 which we use in the glasshouses, but also means we have an efficient power generation system on site. Coupled with the new lighting system we can now deliver a UK crop to Tesco 52 weeks of the year”.
“Our second year in production has seen our supply to Tesco raised substantially so that we are now supply approximately 20% of their needs from the same acreage of glass we had before”.
After two years full experience of growing under lights, the production system has been adapted for this coming third year to a system pioneered and trailed at Stockbridge House Research Centre. This trial supported by the Cucumber Growers Association and sponcered by many supply companies grows the crop under lights on a continues layering system of two crops per year achieving over 100 cucumbers per plant station. This radical change would mean Hedon could raise its production by a further 40%.