I'm a market gardener. Here's why you've probably never really tasted a tomato before

Laura Mythen is a 27-year-old market gardener based in Norwich. She has worked in productive horticulture using organic farming principles since she left higher education. Laura is pragmatic and motivated to bring better food and land management to her local area.

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Big Issue: What do you do?

Laura Mythen: I co-run a market garden in East Anglia where we grow organic vegetables to sell as part of a veg box scheme. We harvest from our site every week. People sign up to receive veg from us, and they get a weekly delivery. And then, alongside the veg growing, we run volunteering opportunities, horticultural education and community events.

You must need a mad set of skills? 

We have to wear a lot of different hats. We get a lot out of and enjoy the community side of things, but it also can feel like quite a big strain. We have to meet a bottom line of production in order to keep our veg bags going, which funds most of our projects, but the volunteering and community events and education are really significant in terms of the overall money, particularly in the winter, when we’re having less veg coming off the site. So we have to do that to pay our wages.

What’s the pay like?

The expectation within the industry is that the pay is low. We earn £13.50 an hour which, compared to other places who do equivalent work, is quite good. I think the complication is to do with whether people are actually working the hours that they’re being paid for. Obviously, to an extent, that’s a choice of individual workers, but a lot of these are community projects, which people feel invested in. When we write our budget, we’re thinking, how many hours can we afford to pay ourselves? The likelihood that we could actually fit in everything that we have to do in a week in those hours is quite minimal. So if you spread the pay over the actual hours worked, it might look a bit different.

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What happens when people have a better understanding of where their food comes from?

One of the most important things for me, and one of the most positive things that I see happening, is having an interaction with the tangible world. Having the opportunity to interact with and be part of the farming process can make people feel really different about their place in the world, or how they relate to their food.

For someone like me, it’s obvious that people are basically being ripped off. When people come on our site – particularly in the summer, when we’ve got things like tomatoes and cucumbers – and they try
them, it’s as if they realise they’ve never had a tomato before. So much of that is to do with our growing practice.

And then people have the opportunity to learn how we compost all the waste on site and that goes into the bed that the tomatoes are growing in, and how that changes both the taste and the nutrition of the tomato. Without a tangible experience of that, you can’t understand it. 

The other aspect of it is to do with the variety of produce that people could be eating. It’s mad, since 1900 we’ve lost 70% of our seed varieties in the UK. The lack of this mixed horticulture has made our diets really bland and nutritionally boring. There are a lot of crops that we grow on our site that most people who visit us have never seen before. 

What also seems weird is how disconnected rural communities have become from growing spaces…

I think there’s a big misconception that if you live in a rural place, you have better access to local foods, or to community gardens, or any kind of public space. I’ve lived in three proper cities, I grew up in a rural place, and now live on the edge of a small city. My experience is that my access to local food when I’ve been living in cities has been much, much higher, and that’s to do with the land ownership. 

In rural places it’s industrial-scale farming. You can go into a farm shop, but there won’t be anything from that farm there. It will be pre-packaged stuff that the farm has brought in, none of which has been grown there.

The project that I work on is on the edge of a city, and it would be very difficult to run that in any other context in terms of needing the space, but also having the routes to market. We have to sell directly to consumers, because otherwise, the money we would get for our produce just would not work out. So we need the market of being in an urban space and to allow people to come to our site as well. 

If we were located in a peaceful rural setting it would be a very different enterprise.

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