My Journey to Understand Agriculture and Produce Part 2: The Importance of Seeds and Sand
A first visit to Beeskow: read part 1
After my discovery of Branca and her beautiful produce, I began arriving at the market promptly at 7:00 a.m. every Thursday and Saturday morning. What soon became clear was that I couldn’t take as much as I would have liked for the dinners I was cooking in my flat. For context, this pre-dated Ernst by a couple of years. There were limits. Each time I tried to buy more, she would tell me, sometimes quite intensely, that I needed to leave some for everyone else. Whenever I asked if I could reserve certain things, she would coldly say no.
I thought that maybe if I showed a special interest in her work and volunteered to help on her farm, it might create a better relationship. Later, I learned her reluctance to work with restaurants stemmed from negative experiences in the past. One chef, for example, had seen her beautiful currant tomatoes at the market. She was growing only about 500 grams in a season, but later that week, his restaurant called asking for 10 kilos. He had no interest in understanding the scale of her farm or the rhythms and cycles of her work.
A lot of the practices we adopted at Ernst – like the constant changing of the menu – came from my desire to work with small farms that couldn’t deliver consistent supplies of produce, but instead had dynamic and interesting things each time. There were also the practical problems chefs often complained about: carrots that weren’t uniform in size or shape. Though there are talented farmers who specialise in supplying restaurants, Branca didn’t want to work that way. Over her years of farming, she had developed a group of loyal customers who accepted the inconsistencies that come with organic farming. Even still, she told me stories about the vegetables she grew in the early 2000s that Berlin customers wouldn’t buy because of their foreign appearance: cime di rapa, puntarella, edamame – all left unsold.
At that point in my life, I knew very little about regenerative agriculture or organic farming – what it truly entailed, and its effect on produce, the soil, and the environment – but I wanted to learn. I became obsessed with cooking with the most interesting and delicious produce I could find.
My only way in was to offer to spend the day helping out on her farm, hoping to begin the process of working with her and eventually being able to pre-order vegetables at the market. We found a day that worked, and she told me she would pick me up from the train station. When I arrived, I called her. She answered with a confused tone. I explained that I had arrived at the station at the time we had agreed on. Shocked, she told me she hadn’t expected me to come and hadn’t bothered to leave the farm. Eventually, she arrived in her old Sprinter van – the same van she used to drive produce into Berlin in the evenings before market days. I got in, and we drove towards the farm.
Branca’s background was always a little mysterious. She was often referred to as the Tomatenfrau. As far as I knew, she was an artist and farmer who had moved to Berlin from Munich after the Wall came down, buying a small piece of farmland in the former East. She is a character full of duality: a strict practitioner of biodynamics, even working as an inspector for Demeter back in the day, while continuously chain-smoking Polish cigarettes.
I met her husband and kids once and had dinner with them in Sicily, but I decided to keep a sort of professional distance, something I tend to have with people I admire deeply.
When we arrived at the farm, tomatoes were decomposing on the table, swarmed by flies. She mentioned, almost in passing, that she used to live in that house with her family. She told me she grows everything from seed – something she expanded on in later conversations. It wasn’t enough, she said, to simply practice organics or biodynamics. Even your seeds must adapt to a sense of place. Over multiple generations of selection, the genetic material adapts to the harsh, sandy growing conditions. Her tomatoes, for example, had adapted to low amounts of water, which concentrated their flavour and brightened their acidity, especially later in the year.
She showed me around the farm. I was introduced to a team of middle-aged women from the area who helped with harvests and fieldwork. Around the house was a small orchard, a barn, and a pond. We walked through a patch of forest overgrown with wild chervil. What initially struck me, and continued to grow throughout the day, was how much life there was everywhere.
When we arrived at the fields, she said to me, “It never rains here, and there is only sand.” What I later came to understand was that the stress and hardship the vegetables went through almost made them more delicious and complex. At first glance, the fields seemed unimpressive. There were several polytunnels filled with tomatoes, which only she was allowed to touch. We walked past a small section of strawberry plants, which she explained were old German varieties rather than hybrids – in her eyes, the reason they looked so bad. Those strawberries, when in season, are still the best I’ve ever had: grown in mineral sand with little water, dense and hard, but incredibly flavourful with developed and complex aromas.
Before long, the work began. My first task was to gather ingredients for the wild herb salad offered at the market. With Doris, one of the women, I harvested chickweed, portulaca, mugwort, sorrel, ground ivy, ground elder, nettle, wild carrot, and more. We walked to specific parts of the farm to find each, under trees, in the orchard, in resting fields. I was slow and over-curious, asking Doris questions in bad German. She made it clear these weren’t herbs she ate herself, but gathering them was her task, and she had been doing it for a long time.
Next, I washed and bundled vegetables. We washed them in collected rainwater, and the way we tied the elastics was meant to avoid bruising the greens of the radishes and carrots. This step was done methodically, ensuring the quality of the vegetables remained the highest priority. Once everything was washed, counted, and packed, we stopped for lunch.
There were whole tomatoes on the table, salt, quark mixed with herbs, and a pile of freshly boiled potatoes from the farm. I watched as the women peeled potatoes with their knives – a real farmer’s lunch. Incredibly earthy and, I know it sounds clichéd, but a deeply connected experience. The women spoke about local gossip and small daily issues. Branca spent lunch smoking restlessly and pasteurising jars of passata made from the less beautiful tomatoes for use at home.
After lunch, I spent a few hours weeding rows of beautiful purple carrots. Branca explained that on her farm, it took significantly longer for carrots to grow to normal size in the sandy, quartz-rich soil. But with the longer growing time, they became more dense and intensely flavoured. Those carrots eventually became a pretty iconic serving in the early days of the restaurant.
She spent the rest of the day telling me about the farm’s agricultural practices – pigs for manure (which she told me I would never eat, as she was vegetarian), various treatments, and her opinions on the poor soil quality. She suggested other farms better suited to supplying restaurants. Many of those suggestions became farmers we worked with over the years.
As the sun started to set, I found myself in a patch of slowly ripening Muscat de Provence pumpkins. That day changed my life forever, although at the time it felt very subtle. The ideas she shared and the way she worked resonated with me on an intrinsic level and filled me with curiosity. It also created a personal attachment and connection to ingredients I had never felt before, something I’ve tried to pass on to others over the years. And maybe most importantly, it was fun. It gave me the same sense of excitement and energy that I still have for it now. Being in those kinds of spaces, where everywhere you look is life.
My belief is that when nature is left alone, it gives a never-ending bounty to humanity and to all we share this world with. The challenge is to coexist with these natural forces and overcome the very human tendencies of greed and excess. When we create regenerative circumstances for the environment, it rewards us with a diverse bounty.
I spent the subsequent years visiting her farm, working with her produce, and learning about agriculture, until her semi-retirement and the handing over of the farm to her son David, who now operates it with his partner under her guidance. Over this series, I’m sure I’ll share other important lessons and experiences from Branca’s farm.
