Leena Organica
No. 04   —   Spring 2026 In hand this week — Festival strawberry, Green Globe artichoke, Beheira flat-leaf parsley Out of season, by choice — pomegranate, mango, okra
A house catalogue  ·  Cairo  ·  Haarlem  ·  edition four

We chose forty things, and we will tell you why.

A spring catalogue of organic fruit, vegetables and herbs from Egypt, with the Dutch inputs that travel the other way. Edited by S. Abushadi, M. Rabie and M. Soliman. Printed for the trade.
No. 01 — Editor's note

A small list, kept honestly

about the house →

Most produce houses publish a price list. We publish a catalogue.

The difference, in our hands, is this. A price list is everything a trader can lay hands on this week. A catalogue is a smaller, slower thing: the items we will stand behind by name, season after season, because we know the field, the grower, the cultivar, and the window in which the fruit is at its best. The list is forty long. It will not grow without good reason.

Forty is the upper limit of attention. Beyond that a buying desk becomes a switchboard, and the produce is treated as a number on a screen. We have done it the other way and we know how it ends — a pallet of pale arils, a complaint email, a discount we did not have to give. So we keep the catalogue short, the relationships long, and the paperwork in one place.

What follows is the spring 2026 edition. Three featured lots are below; the full forty live on the catalogue page. We have also published a small column on what we declined this season. Read both. The second list is usually the more useful one.

No. 02 — In the season

Three lots, brought forward

all forty lots →
Lot 01  ·  In peak through May

The Festival strawberry from Beheira

Fragaria × ananassa 'Festival'  ·  El-Bostan, Wadi El-Natrun fringe

The cultivar most pastry chefs ask for by name and most importers list as 'strawberry'. Festival carries acid further into ripeness than Fortuna, and the aroma — green stem, a faint white pepper — survives a chill cabinet better than the sweeter newer varieties. The fruit Hassan Abdelmonem's daughters pick at first light in March is the same fruit that lands in Rotterdam at the cabinet on Friday.

We ship by air from Cairo for the soft-fruit window, by reefer for IQF. We do not ship Festival outside November through May.

For pastry. The acid holds against cream, the aroma against vanilla. Pair-test against a Fortuna at the same Brix; the difference shows on the second mouthful.

Lot 03  ·  Last weeks of harvest

Green Globe artichoke hearts, IQF

Cynara cardunculus 'Green Globe'  ·  Nubaria reclamation plots

March and the first half of April. After that the field bolts in the heat, the heart goes woody, and what reaches a freezing line is a different vegetable. Our IQF run is short and contracted from October — we will not extend it on demand. The plants are Italian seed grown out for a third generation in Egyptian sand; the heart is firm, sweet at the base, with the proper flush of green that a cold-chain frieze flattens in lesser fruit.

Shipped IQF only. We do not offer fresh artichoke; the heart oxidises before the box reaches Antwerp.

For a winter risotto, a vegetable terrine, a soft tart with brown butter. Defrost slowly in milk; do not boil.

Lot 19  ·  Year-round, peak now

Spearmint from the Nile delta

Mentha spicata 'Nile-leaf'  ·  smallholders, Beheira & Sharqia

Cut at dawn, packed unwashed, in the air by noon, in a Dutch kitchen the next morning. The variety carries more carvone and less menthol than the Moroccan Nana most of the trade ships — it is greener on the nose and rounder on the tongue, and it is the herb we use ourselves when we make tea for a buyer at the office.

Air freight only, Cairo to Schiphol, six days a week. Reefer transit kills the volatiles; we have tried.

For a green tabbouleh, a yoghurt sauce, a glass of pot tea on a hot Cairo afternoon. Do not chop it small — the leaf bruises and the oil goes flat.

No. 03 — What we declined

Five things that did not make the catalogue

spring 2026

The list of what we left off is the most useful one to read.

Every season a row of crates arrives at the packhouse that, by all the obvious measures, should have gone into a container. They do not. Here are five from this spring, and a one-line reason. We publish this list because the discipline is the work.

  • i
    Cape gooseberry — Aswan, May lots
    The Brix held, but the flavour dropped off the moment the daytime ran past 38°C. The lots tasted hot. We stopped buying on the 14th.
  • ii
    Blueberry — Beheira tunnel project
    Interesting field, good people, wrong cultivar for the Northern European trade. The pH still reads two points above where a German retailer will list. We are watching the next planting.
  • iii
    Avocado — Nubaria, second farm
    Water cost is contested in the regional file. We have asked the grower to finish a drip retrofit before we resume; the expected window is October.
  • iv
    Egyptian saffron — three offers, Fayoum
    Stamen length under 28 mm on all three samples; coumarin presence in two. Saffron is a thing we sell once or not for years. We waited.
  • v
    Pomegranate — early Aswan set, June
    The arils were pale, the sugar thin, the rind too thin for shipping. November through January is the only window we ship pomegranate. We will say so again in October.

A catalogue is a working document. We send fresh copy from Haarlem and Cairo every season; we tell you what we like, what we have, and what we do not.

If you want the full forty, browse the catalogue. If you would like to ask a question before you order, write to us — a person reads.