BIG INTERVIEW
On a one-acre plot in North Somerset, Brown Rock Market Garden grows East Friesian palm kale, ananas noire, turnips and tomatoes. BEE BAILEY chats about pollinators, pesticides and lunch
We meet the team behind Brown Rock Market Garden, who supply organic veg to a host of Bristol shops
WHEN Ria Marshall and Anna Barrett stop for lunch in the middle of their working day, there are no sandwiches with curled up edges, or plastic boxes filled with last night’s leftovers, and definitely nothing grabbed from the supermarket on the way in - it’s a freshly prepped salad or something inspired by Japanese cooking, some succulent tomatoes straight off the vine, leaves that have been picked in the last few minutes, beans that are popped straight out of the pod in to the pan.
Lunch when you’re growing your own seasonal veg in a market garden is something to look forward to all morning.
“We eat lunch together on the farm every day we’re working here,” says Anna, from Brown Rock Market Garden. “One of us just takes half an hour to rustle something up and we eat whatever is in season, whatever’s fresh. Most of the time we are totally spoilt for choice.
“At the moment we’ve got some lovely tomatoes; you slice them and have some olive oil and some salt and fresh basil from the polytunnels, and have some bread and you’re away. It’s very simple food but very delicious.”
Ria, 31, started Brown Rock Market Garden in Tickenham, North Somerset in 2019, running it on her own for the first season. Anna, 37, joined two seasons ago and it’s now run equally between them. The friends met through mutual acquaintances in the horticulture world, having both changed course from other careers, Ria from working as a special effects prosthetic artist in film and TV, Anna as a lighting designer in theatre.
Anna still enjoys doing some freelance work in the industry, but felt disconnected when working long hours in dark theatres with nothing but a single spotlight shining. Now she embraces being out in all weathers on the farm.
“I wanted to be much more in connection with the outdoors and the weather and nature and do something that was quite physical as well as mentally challenging,” she says. “I was indoors an awful lot. You go into a room and turn the lights off, and then you put a light on and sit in that room with just one light on for the whole day. With growing work, I find I’ve got much more of a sense of the natural rhythm of the seasons.”
It’s around May that things start getting exciting, when the new crops start coming through and lunch is all about the first taste of something neither of them have eaten since last year.
“We both eat seasonally because we know what food that’s in season tastes like – it’s a bit of a curse, you can’t really eat stuff out of season once you’ve had it,” Anna says.
“The first tomatoes are a real thing. They’re super sweet, juicy, and fresh and absolutely epitomise the time of year.
“With some crops like chard or radishes, you plant them and you get a crop off of them quite quickly. Whereas with tomatoes, you put these thing things in the ground and then you wait, and wait, and wait, and they grow, and grow, and grow, then they make some little flowers, then they make the fruit, the fruit gets bigger and it has to get ripe and then you finally get to eat it. That is why it’s so special.
“When you haven’t tasted it since last year, you can remember where you were when you had the first tomato on previous years. It’s a really nice marker of passing time.”
With just under an acre of rented land, this all-woman team produces a tasty crop of vegetables to organic standards, planting four or five different things in the beds over the course of a year, working exclusively with hand tools, and to the natural rhythm of the seasons, with no pesticides, extra heat or artificial light.
By choosing to stay small scale, they can work the way they want to. Every bit of soil is dug by hand, every seed is planted by hand, every weed pulled up by hand, and every piece of food harvested by hand.
With no need to leave room for tractors and machinery between the beds, Anna says they can also cram more produce into the space. That, in turn, gives them the luxury of having a wildflower grass meadow strip along the edge of the veg plot where pollinators thrive.
“It’s a great place for all the beneficial insects to live, which means you’ve got pest control for the things that would eat your veg – ground beetles eat slug eggs; crickets are hosts for parasitic wasps which will predate on aphids,” Anna says. “A lot of places just maximise productivity so would have another row of cabbages there, but we’re such small scale that it’s really important to us to look after the eco system so it can help us look after our crops.
“We’ve seen grass snakes, toads, voles, there are often birds of prey wheeling around in the summer – it’s alive with wildlife. You’re often just out picking vegetables and it’s buzzing. It’s pretty idyllic really, quite an amazing spot.”
As well as being beautiful, the site, which overlooks the start of the Somerset Levels, has alluvial soil, rich and free draining, that has drawn other market garden growers to the area in the past.
“It’s nice to work,” Anna says of the soil. “It’s what old school farmers call boys’ soil because it’s supposed to be so easy to farm on that even a boy could do it. We call it smug soil.”
Maintaining good soil health is key for Ria and Anna, something that helps their pledge to make everything ecologically grown. For Anna, the proactive decision to work in a way that predates the invention of pesticides is significant.
“It feels like there’s a huge amount of chemicals and external input in what we call modern agriculture, though that has only really been the way we’ve done it since post-Second
World War when pesticides and fertilisers were created, because they had a lot of chemicals left over from making munitions in the war. The more degraded the soil gets, the more fertiliser you need to put on, so it’s a never-ending cycle.
“I love food and I’m a big fan of nature so it makes lots of sense to farm organically.”
With an eye on maintaining consistency and quality throughout the season Brown Rock Market Garden has a select number of about 15 lines, including salad which has 30 different varieties within it.
Their produce supplies shops and restaurants in the Bristol and North Somerset area, catering to the needs of chefs by growing unusual veg and leaving tops on crops.
“We’ve got four different types of tomatoes at the moment, like tomatillos – Mexican green tomatoes that come in a papery case. They are delicious. They taste very sharp, almost zingy, a limey tomato,” Anna says.
“We’ve got different types of kale: one really tall, it’s about six foot now; East Friesian curly kale that looks like a palm tree. Then we have lots of successional sowings of different things, which is when you have something like eight different sowings so you’ve got a steady stream of something. We’ve got spring onions, fennel, earlier in the year we had lots of radish and little gem lettuce heads.
“We’ve got a lovely salad mix which changes weekly. In autumn you’ll have spicy mustards, in the spring, endives, and in the winter chicories, which are a bit more bitter and also delicious. They are amazing colours, bright pinks, and reds and stripy.
“And then you have all sorts of fancy bits, pea shoots, perennial salad like salad burnet, which tastes a bit cucumber-y and has a lovely frilly-shaped leaf. There’s buckshorn plantain, we do things like beetroot and chard leaf and kale leaf but we sow them close together and that makes really small, quite tender leaves.
“There’s agretti, it’s a bit like an Italian samphire. We sell those to chefs and put the tips of it in the salad mix. It’s hard to come by and I think chefs always like something that is unusual and looks good on the plate. It is quite succulent… a bit like eating a houseplant! It’s got that crunchy, succulent texture to it which it maintains when it’s cooked,” she says.
“Chefs love the fennel. We sell it with the tops on so you get two crops for the price of one; you can use it for flavouring in dishes and then you’ve got the bulb at the bottom. We sell our beetroots bunched with the tops on and you can just use the tops as you would use chard.
“It’s interesting having conversations with the chefs and the people who run veg shops, who are all very much on board with what we do. We can make sure things are packaged in the way they want. There’s beauty in that detail.”
While Brown Rock Market Garden is thriving on a relatively small plot, the ethos is big – encouraging people to buy as much local produce as possible.
“We don’t want people to be trying to buy our food from far away,” Anna says. “It’s about supporting local producers.
“We’re not going to feed the world. We’ve chosen to stay this scale and do things at this scale because it suits us and it allows us to take good care of what we have. It’s definitely important that there are other scales of growers out there, mid-scale and large-scale growers are super important – we are just trying to do our little bit.”
Follow Brown Rock Market Garden @brown.rock.market. garden on Instagram.
The produce can be found in shops including Hugo’s Greengrocer Deli on Bedminster Parade and North Street, Bristol; and The Public Market food store and deli in Easton, Bristol.
I wanted to be much more in connection with the outdoors and the weather and nature and do something that was quite physical as well as mentally challenging Anna Barrett, on switching careers to work Brown Rock Market Garden