…you might well see swathes of glossy, green wild garlic leaves but you probably won’t see any of our Lynher Dairies leaf-picking team at work because we forage in out-of-the-way places where we know the best leaves will have grown untouched, and mostly unseen, by human activity. We can’t use torn or trodden-on leaves, nor do we want anything that might have been exposed to any traffic fumes or other pollutants so we really do have to hike off into the great Cornish beyond. But we need to hurry – the wild garlic loses its beautiful deep colour all too quickly, and once the flowers arrive, we’ve had it.

This winter (as we all know!) has been a long and cold one, and that has an effect on the leaves we pick. Size matters, with nettle leaves in particular. Too small a leaf and the traditional concentric circle our skilled nettlers employ to wrap our Yargs in is impossible. Gathering thousands of the very best leaves in what is a fairly tight time scale is no easy task.

We owe Nature a great deal, but let’s hear it for our pickers too!