Every fortnight, Ikuko Suzuki writes an email detailing the fruit and vegetables which she and her husband, Robin Williams, are harvesting that week. It’s an inventory of what the season and NamaYasai, their East Sussex farm, are conspiring to produce at a given time, but Ikuko’s words – sparse, but peppered with sporadic details – read like poetry. A recent one told customers to expect:
Plums (if they are not eaten by birds [then] blackcurrants), Green shiso, Mizuna, Kujo-negi, Komatsuna or Karashina, New Zealand spinach, Icicle daikon (very small daikon), Home made pickles (wild garlic in soy sauce)
I, a London-dwelling vegetable worshipper, am on the receiving end of these emails, having bought NamaYasai produce on-and-off for ten years. What my fortnightly carrier bag lacks in volume – this is not a haul of staples big enough to feed a family of four for two weeks – it makes up for with thrilling revelations.
“I wasn’t going to grow carrots, lettuce, potatoes – I wouldn’t have stood a chance,” says Robin, describing how he started the farm with just a quarter of an acre in 2004, with no previous farming experience, “so I targeted things that other people weren’t growing.” Those things were mostly Japanese in origin, which he predicted would become more popular amongst British chefs over the ensuing years. Determined to swap his screen-based life for one in which he could get his hands dirty, he considered winemaking and horticulture, but couldn’t ignore the pull to growing produce little known to UK soil – his instincts well-founded. NamaYasai now supplies up to thirty restaurants in the south-east each day, as well as the veg bags destined for the homes of fans like me.
A long-time Lewes resident and former IT consultant, Robin would annually rent his spare room to opera singers working at Glyndebourne, “but Ikuko turned up as a student [in international development] and I made an exception – good job I did!” he laughs. The couple have a son, Kazuo, now at university reading engineering, and run a small and well-oiled machine at NamaYasai. Having Ikuko’s specialist input – both as a Japanese native and a soil scientist – wasn’t always a given, however. Originally, she couldn’t see how her husband’s niche agricultural business idea would work because the Japanese and British climates are so different, she tells me, sipping herbal tea from a thermos with a piece of blackcurrant cake shared among staff and volunteers. “It’s colder here, and the rainfall patterns are opposite.” Sussex was, in her mind, ill-suited to growing the produce she’d grown up with.
But Robin’s vision was clear, and once they started growing, Ikuko was proved wrong. “When we started, fresh daikon, or yuzu, were unheard of around here,” he remembers. NamaYasai, which means both ‘fresh vegetables’ and ‘new birth’ or ‘new field’ in Japanese – is aptly-named, for it marked a new birth of sorts in its founder(s) as well as the soil – launched at farmers’ markets with bags of mixed salad, in which the likes of peppery mizuna and purple shiso, which have a distinctive herbaceous flavour and slight numbing quality, were added to more familiar leaves, both a thrill in a mouthful of salad.
That ‘new birth’ also speaks to a cultural shift that Robin foresaw, perhaps because he was experiencing something of it in himself: “I thought there would be a surge of interest amongst young people in farming and working on the land. And that has definitely happened in the last decade,” he says of office work and city living. Particularly since the pandemic. Most Saturdays, Robin tells me, they have volunteers from London, and "sometimes we do detect signs that they are suffering with some kind of anxiety or screen addiction.” At NamaYasai, volunteers can, as Robin did, find an antidote to modern life and – after the journey down a winding, mossy lane with intentionally poor signposting – experience seamless connection to the land. On the day I visit, volunteers plant rows of plums, or transfer plugs of flowering okra, pak choi and crown daisy to the ground, as well as prepare the morning’s harvest for restaurant deliveries. 
Having been unsure in the early days, Ikuko is now as involved as she possibly could be. Together with volunteers and a few paid staff, she and Robin sow, tend, harvest and prepare all their deliveries themselves over an eight-hour working day that begins so early that most people would deem it the middle of the night. She also corresponds with all their customers, restaurants and veg bags clients alike, and prepares everything from statements to pickles, using surplus vegetables from that week – my favourite is her pickled kabu, a small, pastel-white Japanese turnip. (I would happily subsist on these with rice, wilted greens with ponzu, perhaps an egg.)
When we arrive at 7am on a Friday in late June, the team have been harvesting with head torches since before 3am and can now be found packing crates of produce destined for some of the capital’s most lauded restaurants. Chefs, says Robin, are often shocked by the freshness of NamaYasai produce, “usually they’ll never have used anything so fresh. Everything is harvested on the day it reaches them.” Nama yasai, quite literally.
Committed to this dazzling freshness, Robin and Ikuko have always resisted wholesalers and middlemen, preferring instead to keep their gruelling routine and to limit the delivery radius to London and Brighton. They also operate a zero-chemical, extreme take on organic farming, and take us up to see their green manure field, which, I should add, is neither exclusively green nor actual manure at all – but a living fertiliser made in a pasture of nitrogen fixing crops like clover, also tall rye grass and purple phacelia. This ‘manure’, which takes over a year to develop, is then ploughed into the soil elsewhere to boost its fertility.
Robin and Ikuko are fully committed to working with nature, not against it, still all too rare in agriculture. They avoid weeding wherever possible, also herbicides and polyethene; when a crop is too prone to pests (like swede), they’re more likely to abandon the crop than try to beat the critters; and harvestable produce often emerges unplanned, like the self-seeding New Zealand spinach that has burst out alongside the aubergine and basil patch in one greenhouse, a kind of living edging. They also harvest and sell some produce early – plums, green figs, fig leaves – to avoid loss to the likes of wasps and starlings, a practicality with perks for restaurants, who can push the limits of their diners’ expectations with new concoctions like infusions and ferments.
That said, NamaYasai produce is almost at its best unadorned. I return to London with more poetry, this time wrapped up in newspaper, a glorious bouquet of mineral leaves and a pot of freshly picked blackcurrants and red gooseberries, which I eat with my children in the sun. They are, for once, still and silent. Incredible really, that a handful of just-plucked berries can elicit so much contentment.
Robin wears the TOAST Garment Dyed Linen Grandad Collar Shirt and Cotton Canvas Shorts. Ikuko wears the Cleo Cotton Tee. Chu Chun wears the Patch Pocket Denim Dungaree Dress.
Words by Mina Holland.
Photography by Elena Heatherwick.
Add a comment