I Make Pickles Now

And other things I never thought I would say...

The sun was warm as I sat on the stone wall in the garden. I had just collected a big bunch of kale, or was it cauliflower, for dinner. I checked my phone before I headed in to start cooking and saw another handful of notifications - a parcel had gone missing, another had exploded in a cloud of flour on delivery and a third from our box supplier informing me of a 25% price hike. It was early autumn in 2020. We’d spent the spring and summer shipping hundreds of thousands of kilos of flour and sourdough kits.

It had been good, but it had been hard. We worked insane hours and still never caught up. We were constantly fighting a tide of delays and logistics issues. It kept us afloat when we couldn’t run events, but cost us a lot in other ways. Doing it all, essentially along, was too much and it was taking a massive toll and I knew I couldn’t sustain it.

I closed my eyes, let the sun soak into my skin and swore to myself I would never, NEVER sell products again. As soon as I could get out, I would go back to writing and photography and the things I do best…gathering people together online or in person sharing the stories of how and why things are made.

If this newsletter were a film, this is the point where there would be a montage of the last five years that includes just that - lots of writing and photography, some events thrown in there, a new business partner, Lucy, who shared the vision…

And then —record scratch—a shot of me packing cucumbers into jars, shipping hundreds of boxes of preserves and spices, learning about SALSA accreditation and traceability software and some how finding myself doing the same thing I swore I wouldn’t be doing 5 years ago - shipping products (only this time with heavy glass - a logistical nightmare in comparison to flour!!).

You’d think at the ripe age of 40+ I would’ve known not to say never, but some lessons are harder to learn, for me at least.

Goat Rodeo Goods, our preserving company, came out of work with our friends at Upper Ballaird Farm in Buchlyvie. We’d been buying their veg for events when one day in August 2023 we’d gotten a text asking if we wanted their excess cucumbers that were going to go to waste. “Could you do something with them?” Phillipp asked.

We could and did, Lucy - my business partner and a chef - and I put our heads together to make a small range of pickles for our upcoming Christmas market. We leaned heavily into American-style pickles - punchy and vinegar forward - the kind I liked. Wanting to fill our stall for the market, we also worked on a range of seasonings - slightly lighter and easier to ship.

In the second montage of this newsletter that isn’t a film - we would show a range of scenes — realising we were on to something, commissioning a range of cucumbers for Upper Ballaird to grow in 2024, expanding so quickly it made our head spin, new branding, new name to now when we are stocked in over 150 farm shops, delis and foodhalls around the country and ever expanding.

In many ways, Goat Rodeo Goods came out of the blue, in other ways it was always there.

The fun branding and bright colours are an antidote to the tiredness I felt with a lot of the local food movement that can feel very wholesome and “worthy”. Many of the recipes are adaptations of those I had developed for courses and books. Shipping all of that flour in 2020/2021 meant that I knew the basics of logistics, couriers, and web design for a product business. We work with local regenerative farms to create small batch products - all building on contacts we’ve made through my work as Gartur Stitch Farm. Even the same, is a nod to Gartur’s insane range of goats.

I make pickles. And when I am not making pickles, I am thinking about making pickles. Or how to ship pickles. Or how to sell pickles. Or how to grow dill for pickles. Or how to dry kimchi.

I am pretty sure that if you’d told the Kat sitting in the garden in 2020 this is what her life would look like in 2025, she would’ve fallen off that garden wall. But then, maybe none of us should be that surprised.

That Kat, like this Kat, always liked a challenge.

If you fancy seeing what we are up to at the ol’ Goat Rodeo, pop over here.