Still Another '50% off' Special Offer!
So this month the offer is on Bocaddon - in it's various guises, and of course Yarg and Wild Garlic Yarg. Once again you can get 50% off the price of these cheeses! This is a bargain in any language.
The offer starts on Friday (19th June) and runs until midnight on the 30th June. It doesn't, I'm afraid, apply to wedding cakes or to these cheeses when they're included in a gift box.
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Bocaddon Farm: Small is Beautiful
 On a gorgeous sunny day (with only the occasional torrential downpour) I head down past Liskeard then shoot off left: in a few miles the sign for Bocaddon Farm comes into view and in one end of a small barn I meet the hyper-keen driving force behind Bocaddon cheese, Valerie Genix.
Bocaddon is a great 'fresh' cheese (i.e it's ready to eat straight away with no maturing) which has been around in its current incarnation for a couple of years. Before that, a similar cheese was made by Lynher Dairy: when they decided to concentrate purely on Yarg, the enterprising people at Bocaddon Farm bought the equipment. But Valerie's quick to tell me that the cheese has 'moved on' - they've worked on the recipe, and - crucially - it uses the rather special milk from the farm's own herd of Guernsey cows.
There's the usual sense of quiet purpose and teamwork and an obvious commitment to the cheese from Valerie and her multi-national team. Originally from the French Alps, she works with American cheesemaker Phil and a real foreigner, Bernice (she's from Devon). Valerie was brought in a year or so ago with a mission to develop the business and market the cheese. Disullusioned with the music business in Paris, she's hugely energetic and go-ahead, and thinks that British cheesemakers have much to learn from their French counterparts who band together into regional co-operatives to great advantage.
Bocaddon is available in several versions.
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And Medium-Sized is Pretty Good, Too: Lynher Dairy
 In one obvious way, Bocaddon and Lynher Dairy present a real contrast. Lynher - makers of the now very well-known Yarg (and it's sibling Wild Garlic Yarg) - employ about 25 people. And when you roll up to their extremely smart, and quite large, dairy at Ponsanooth, between Redruth and Penryn, it's very clear that this partcular maker has moved a number of rungs up the ladder.
Alan Gray - the original maker of Yarg - had a minor stroke of genius when he decided to cover a lovely light-tasting, Caerphilly-esque cheese with nettles (and later, wild garlic leaves, as seen here). The result is yunique (sorry). On a taste level, on an aesthetic level, it just works.
I met Catherine Mead, current owner of the business (it's gone through a couple of hands and migrated west from it's original home on Bodmin Moor) who shows me around the really very impressive building. Although it's a bigger undertaking, there's the same efficient-but-friendly atmosphere as at Bocaddon. And I like the way Catherine greets all the staff. The banter in the 'nettling' room - with the four women who put the nettles on - is especially good. They obligingly allow yet another visitor to photograph them as they apply one leaf after another. It's very carefully done: the pattern isn't random, and they also choose the leaves with care to make sure the cheese is well covered without too much overlapping. There's more to nettling than you think!
In a sad postcript to our chat, Catherine tells me that they used to get all the milk from their own farm and other local ones. They can't do that any more - becuase a number of local farmers have been driven out of dairying. By chance, today's BBC News observed that half of all dairy farmers have gone bust in the last 10 years. But we import milk. Does that make sense?
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Fathers' Day is Sun 21st - so send your Aged Parent a 