The journey from yellow fields to the kitchen

The rapeseed fields around littleseed farm are looking gloriously sunny and yellow at the moment, it just took that sun filled few days to tip them into nearly neon. It seems to have been a long wait to see the flowers and it will be another long wait until the fruits of our labour end up in a bottle of our rapeseed oil so we thought we’d share with you a bit about the life-cycle of the rapeseed we grow here on the farm.

When is rapeseed planted in the UK?

Our littleseeds are planted in late August, which is not long after the previous year’s crop has been harvested. It’s a pretty labour-intensive job and keeps the farm machines busy for a week or two. During the slow growing time, they will grow from a green leafy crop to then display those golden yellow flowers that we are now seeing. We will continue to see them flower into early summer. It’s only once the flowers have faded in late summer and the seed pods are formed that the real goodness is revealed. It’s those tiny seeds that we need to produce that yellow nectar in our bottles!

How is cold pressed rapeseed oil made?

Those tiny seeds are then cold pressed to make our oil. Our presses here are simply like large screws which cold press the seeds by gently squeezing the oil from them. Nothing more, nothing less.  We don’t use heat or chemicals to do this. That’s not our style! In short, this gentle process retains the majority of the minerals, vitamins, enzymes and trace elements that make our oil the healthier choice for you. Exactly as nature intended! And then we start all over again.