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The turning point for us was coming into the lockdown, really recognising that we were both quite burnt out.

I guess it gave an opportunity to pull up and just take stock of what we were doing.

We had already acquired the land here, and some people came who were looking to set up a market garden, and they said there's a lot that would need to be put in and invested in, and for them, that wasn't going to be suitable.

We said, "We're really interested in what you're doing." We stayed in touch, so we volunteered, helping them to set that market garden up. And in that process, it made us aware of how much amazing food can be grown on just under an acre.

We had a house that we were living in, in the local village, and for that first year, we were kind of going back and forwards between the house and here.

We realised quite quickly across that, energetically, it was really splitting our time. Also, with our children, it was like packing up for camping every day.

After the first year, we moved on site in temporary setups, and I think we realised as well that being on site was really the start of building our relationship with the land.

We put together the application. It's a Welsh government policy, a One Planet development, and basically, the idea for it is to bring people back to working on the land.

We were like, "Well, we could do that kind of hand-in-hand with doing the market garden and living in a really low-impact, sustainable way."

So I didn't really grow any food until my mid-20s. I came out of university, and I became involved in a lot of environmental activism, so there was a lot of energy of, like, we can change the world.

And, in some ways, it felt like a powerful time, but I think it also felt like quite a disconnected time, and essentially, I ended up having a mental breakdown, which was obviously really horrible and ended up completely incapacitated with anxiety and depression.

I was really lucky to take part in this horticultural therapy project where it was me and 50 other people working in a walled garden together, and these 50 other people were all experiencing mental health struggles of one kind or another, and we basically got taught to grow food. It's cheesy and it's a cliché, but it did completely change my life. I just suddenly started to feel this sense of peace that I hadn't felt before. It was the first hopeful thing that I'd done in a really long time.

After I started to feel well, I went to volunteer at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Mid Wales. It was like a six-month placement, live in a cottage, work in the garden, and then go back to the city afterwards.

And that was 12 years ago and I did six months in the garden and then was like, "I just have to stay here. This is beautiful."

So we set up a veg box scheme, and then later a community food-growing project, and then later, a training program for people who grow food. I don't know where I got all the energy because it was kind of years of just pouring my energy into it. It felt really good.

It didn't feel draining. It felt like I was getting a lot from setting up all of these food projects.

My mom grew up as one of eight on a mixed farm in the south of Holland, and the whole family are farmers, so all eight kids have kind of gone on to do farming. And now the next generation of cousins, a lot of us are going back to farming now as well, after spending a few years of going away from the farm, now coming back.

In my mum's family, there's this myth of the farmer. So you're either born a farmer or you're not a farmer, and so I always felt I'm not a farmer because I'm interested in arts and interested in singing and music, and I haven't got the stamina of what it takes to be a farmer.

I saw my mom doing that, and I was like, "Oh, that looks like hard work. I don't want to do that." And I think in the back of my head, with the imposter syndrome, that's always there. I find it hard to believe that I'm going to be able to do it. I would like to kind of figure out different ways of doing it, that are my own way.

Growing up, I didn't know I was going to be a farmer. I was living with a friend in London, and she got a letter from a friend of hers who was taking on Charles Dowding's holding while he went to France for a couple of years.

I just thought, "That's what I want to do." And I didn't know that I wanted to do it until I'd read this letter. I didn't know it was a thing you could do.

So I just asked, "Can I come and help?"

And I did. That was the happiest time of my life, just being on that holding, letting go of all the stresses and strains of living and working in London, growing. It just made me happy.

When we bought the farm in July '94, I was pregnant. We were renting, but we were growing, and we had lots of people excited about buying our veg.

And because of my politics, I suppose, we were determined to see it as community-supported agriculture, even though we set it up as a partnership and a business. So we had a lot of support from our scheme members who physically came out and helped us grow.

And we would just park our babies up on the ground wherever we were working, ate together, and we saw the
business grow together, and life was good. It was the good life. It was the thing we'd bought into.

We had complications in the planning system, mainly that the application wasn't being processed, so it went
on for an awfully long time. What we realised was we needed to really focus on the market garden, and because we'd put the whole application in, it meant things like polytunnels and the track into the site was all
halted. So we pulled the application out and resubmitted just for the market garden.

At the beginning of the season, I get excited about the year ahead.

This time of year, autumn, October time, we've done a lot of the growing, and now we have to do the selling, and that transition, it makes me feel quite, I don't know if I can do it again.

But then over winter, you rest, and you get that energy again for the next year.

Just trying to get more wise with the machinery as well and rely less on doing things by hand, because that's where you feel the toll on the body.

We stretched ourselves. We got in debt. We had nowhere to live. It's been overwhelming, detrimental to my health. We've sacrificed family time. There's been no holidays.

As the woman, it was easier for me with young kids to do the admin rather than the growing. It became more and
more that I was just the jack of all trades, master of none. I cover for staff. I do the admin. I cook lunch. I'm not the grower that I set out to be.

We used to do what we were calling patchwork farming. So we used to borrow other people's land, which was actually really cool.

Someone would give us a field here or a bit of land there, and we'd be growing different crops in different places.

I think I did get jaded over time because it was like, we don't have long-term security on this land. We can't build any infrastructure.

We don't have the money. I'm earning less than minimum wage.

It was so hard to make this my livelihood that essentially I had to give up on that dream of being a farmer and find something else to do, and it seems crazy that that was so difficult and impossible.

I do put other people's objectives or perspectives ahead of mine, trying to keep everyone happy and kind of helping it all work smoothly, but then I'm like, "Wait, am I actually okay with where we're going with it now?" I think that's probably something I need to voice a bit more, at least to myself.

That would help me maybe feel less imposter syndrome.

Going into the next chapter in terms of the planning system, in terms of giving us the certainty of being able to live here, it feels like not just searching for the end goal, just working with that continual relationship with the land here and drawing resource from that.

And to bring that inquiry into how we make choices always with the land and nature in mind, I'd like to bring through.

I'm a seed sovereignty coordinator, so I work with different growers and farmers who want to grow rare seeds or revive rare seeds.

I do feel massive optimism to still be part of the movement. I think it's just my personal story didn't go in that direction, that I'm not the one on the land growing the food. I'm the one kind of supporting that.

I'm still working with seeds, and I hope that I'm going to find a way back to planting those seeds and harvesting them for people again in the future.

I grew up here and had a really wonderful upbringing and everything that surrounded that, so the community that
surrounded that, not just family, but lots of friends coming and going and lodgers and workers and members of the village coming and going, and I think that's what I want to keep going, that it's this whole world as opposed to just a business.

It's been good. It's been so good, even though it was so horrible most of the time. We lived our dream.

We got to buy a piece of land when so many people can't, given the economic system in which we live.

And any small-scale grower pitched against the economic system of industrialised agriculture will tell you how hard it is, but I still wouldn't change anything, I don't think.

It is the 10th of February and I am just heading out into the garden, to do, I think some land preparation this morning.

I'm just attempting to get some of this compost into the recycling box, and feeling really excited, about doing it.

I feel like a real gardener.

[MUSIC - Acoustic guitar]

A woman performs gardening tasks, emptying buckets of compost onto the ground.

This is where I'm going to try and establish a three sisters garden again, I think with more corn hopefully this time.