Freya Robinson is a young farmer with an incredible passion for soil, nutrition and health. Her story alone is worth listening to. The cast is full of information to get you inspired.
Freya can be reached at:
https://www.oldtreebrewery.co.uk/
https://www.instagram.com/forest.freya/
To consider training with Hannah Jewel, your host, visit:
https://jewelofpeace.com/training/
Hannah Jewel · No Dig Farming, Soil & Mycelium With Freya Robinson
Hello everybody, and welcome to Peace Building with Hannah Jewel. This Podcast is about healing, healthcare and education as we move into a new way of living on planet earth. I work in these industries myself with a range of modalities, including energy therapies, movement and somatics, nutrition and indigenous pathways.
Today we have Freya Robinson with us. Freya started an amazing project with a No-Dig Farm and Market Garden. Today she’s going to talk to us about No-Dig farming and its importance to soil, nutrition and health.
It’s so nice to have you here Freya.
Freya: It’s very nice to be here, thank you for having me.
Hanah: So, when did you begin farming?
Freya: I started farming when I was 21, which was 8 years ago.
Hannah: And what led you into that?
Freya: I had absolutely no connection with farming whatsoever. I actually hated food, I didn’t like food, I only ate supermarket packet food – I didn’t eat any fruit, I wouldn’t touch anything that wasn’t uniform and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I quite liked everything at school and just never really found a direction. I never felt really connected to anything in our current education system – I ended up being quite depressed. When I was 21 (years old) a friend of mine called Joel, who was a gardener, we started hanging out and he was always talking about how amazing it was watching plants grow, and soil, and worms – and I suddenly realised I had no connection to this world, and I always felt a fear of working in that place so I thought that’s probably a good place to star challenging myself. So I looked for a job as a gardener and found a job on a farm just by chance, and I went for it thinking there’s no way I’ll get it. For some reason, I got it, and after about 2 weeks I realised this is where I’m meant to be! And I never looked back. I feel so passionate about trying to inspire and educate – especially young people – about food because I felt for me it was such a missing link to our planet and our place in it. Our connection to plants, and animals, and the earth itself, can be through food and I feel it should be a part of our food system.
Hannah: So from your typical English diet of fish and chips, and pizza, and meal deals…
Freya: Yeah just lots of processed, packet, take away – everything was in a plastic packet and almost everything has been processed in some way.
Hannah: And then you got your hands in the soil, and everything changed?
Freya: It was just incredible! That first year I saw a broccoli in a flower, and I had never realised my entire life that I was eating the head of flower buds when I was eating broccoli. Broccoli was just this separate object that came wrapped in a plastic packet from Sainsbury’s – this cut off, hard, green lump with all these random bubbles on it. I had no connection to where that had come from and I never questioned it. When I actually saw in the field this massive bush of bright yellow flowers I remember just sitting on my knees and crying. I just thought I can’t believe I’ve been eating this my whole life and nobody ever told me or showed me that it’s flowers. There’s so many people I tell that don’t realise that a broccoli head is unopened flowers.
Hannah: Wow, wow.
Freya: But it’s just a series of connections since then. I have this feeling still every single day working outside – it’s never the same, it’s always changing.
Hannah: Wow, you know I didn’t realise this either.
Freya: Really?
Hannah: I thought broccoli was like, a cabbage, or a beet, or something. Just a vegetable that grew on a stalk.
Freya: It’s in the same family as a cabbage, they’ve all been bred from brasica kale. That’s why they are all so similar: brussell sprouts, kale, broccoli, cabbages, spicy salads. They are all very similar in flavour – and if you left a cabbage to flower it would have a very similar flower head, but much smaller. So the broccoli has been bred to have this big, lovely, tender head – but all the brasicas would still make these sprouts. That’s why you have purple sprouts, this is sort of an heirloom variety that hasn’t been bred to have this giant, one, uniform head.
Hannah: Yeah, it’s beautiful. I would love to see a field of broccoli.
Freya: Come to the farm! We’ve got giant, huge, yellow bushes…..listen to the full cast for more!