Month by month
Spanish oranges in December, the settled month
December is the only month of our campaign in which no window opens and none closes. Navelina, Navel Foios and Clemenules sit inside theirs from the first day to the last, and nothing hands over to anything. That makes December the simplest month to write a specification for, and the worst one to leave until the last minute.
The figures
| Month | December |
|---|---|
| On the tree in this area | Clementina Clemenules, Navel Foios, Navelina |
| Varieties in window | 3 |
| Windows opening or closing this month | None |
| Inside their window from the first day to the last | Navelina, Navel Foios, Clementina Clemenules |
| First change after this month | Clemenules closes and Navel Lane Late opens, both in the second half of January |
What it changes on an order
You run a fixed weekly programme
A month with no handover inside it is a month where the same specification describes every week of it. That is rarer than the calendar makes it look, and it is worth using for the deliveries you cannot afford to renegotiate.
You are buying into the holiday weeks
Demand concentrates and the working days do not. Ask which days the packing station is closed and how that moves a collection, because a settled harvest window settles nothing about the calendar on the ground.
You want to compare two growers properly
With no variety change inside the month, two December quotes describe the same fruit and the difference between them is the offer itself. In January that stops being true.
What this note does not settle
- A stable window is not a stable supply. The fruit still comes off the tree week by week and the quantity behind each week is confirmed one at a time.
- Nothing here covers closing days, transport bookings or the state of the road network during the holiday period, and all three decide arrival dates.
- The price series we publish is a run of weeks from the current calendar year. December falls outside it, so there is no figure here to read the month against.
A month with nothing in it to renegotiate
Every other month of our campaign has a boundary inside it or hard against it. December has neither. The three varieties in window entered it earlier and leave it later, so a specification agreed for the first delivery of the month still describes the last one accurately. On a programme with several drops that is worth considerably more than it sounds.
It changes what a buyer should do with the month. Use it for the deliveries that are hardest to fix: the fussy customer, the depot that does not read a specification carefully, the load where a substitution would cost a phone call nobody wants to make. Put the awkward volume in December and keep the flexible part for later.
What a quiet calendar still does not settle
A month with no handover in it is not an easy month. Demand concentrates into a short stretch while the working days shrink around it, so the binding constraint moves off the tree and onto the depot and the road. Closing days at the packing station, transport bookings and the dates a receiving warehouse will accept a pallet decide arrival far more than the harvest does.
Ask about those before asking about fruit. Which days are worked, how late a collection can still be booked, and the last date an order can leave with any prospect of arriving before the holiday. None of it appears on a harvest calendar and all of it is what goes wrong in December.
Talk to the grower
Tell us the variety, the sizes and the delivery week you need. You get a delivered price and what we can commit to in writing, from the person who picks the fruit.
The grower handles enquiries. Response times are still to be confirmed.