Food Champions of Hastings and St Leonards
Stephen Atkinson & Hélène Maerschalck of Stonelynk Organics
Stephen and Hélène on the farm
Welcome to the second in our food champion series profiling people working with food in our local community.
This series features conversations with people involved in the food system locally – from farmers to chefs, from teachers to social entrepreneurs. This week, we hear from Stephen and Hélène of Stonelynk Organics.
What do you do and what’s your mission?
Stonelynk Organics is a small market garden, growing a wide range of organic vegetables and fruit. We sell our produce on site in our shop, as well as via a veg box delivery scheme across Hastings and St Leonards. We also supply a few other local businesses such as The Cove in Fairlight, and Trinity Wholefoods. Our mission is to produce high-quality, delicious, healthy food for our local community and to do so in a way that not only protects but enhances our local environment and biodiversity. Sadly, so much food is produced in such ecologically damaging ways, and fresh fruit and vegetables in particular are so often imported from distant countries, contributing to its environmental cost. We want to show that it’s possible – and essential – for us as a society to produce better, healthier, ecological food right here on our doorsteps.
When did you get started, what’s the back story to set up?
Stonelynk Organics started in 2018. I [Stephen] met Hélène Maerschalck in the summer of 2017, whilst working together on an organic vegetable farm in Dorset. We started to develop dreams of running our own food project, and, fortunately, the opportunity to rent some organic land in Fairlight arose; so we moved over to East Sussex to give it a go!
What is the change you want to see in Hastings when it comes to your work?
We’d love to see more people enjoying healthy local food, freshly cooked at home. A big part of this is education; we’d love to see local school groups come out to food projects such as ours to see how good food is produced. We want children to develop an understanding of our collective reliance on a healthy, vibrant planet for all our resources and, therefore, how essential it is to look after it. And of course, to learn how utterly delicious freshly picked tomatoes are, how crunchy an apple is straight off the tree, and how all these things rely on countless organisms beneath our feet to keep the soil alive and productive.
We’re currently undertaking some training to host school groups at our market garden, and are working with Rother District Council on their Farms And School Twinning Project to bring more school children out into the countryside to see the farmland.
How do you feel about the food scene in Hastings?
We feel really supported by the local Hastings community:there seems to be a real interest in and care for local food projects and support for new initiatives such as ours from both individuals and also other businesses within Hastings. It’s great to have lots of other small producers making high-quality products, all with the same goal of bringing more local food to the area.
How does what you are doing link to what others are doing in the community?
We partner with Sustenance, a food charity based in St Leonards who host a community kitchen every week, cooking up delicious, nutritious food for those in need. We supply them with surplus produce whenever we have a glut – they’re experts at using up mountains of beetroot and pumpkins when the harvests get too much!
We also love supplying Trinity Wholefoods in Hastings, who have been a pillar of the local organic scene for decades having recently celebrated their 40th anniversary of operating as a co-operative. They’ve been so supportive of us since we started, and always stock a wide range of excellent organic produce (our vegetables included!).
Who in Hastings or the region is your food champion & why?
We owe a great deal of gratitude to Jo and Craig Sams, from whom we rented our site when we first moved to East Sussex in 2018 – and bought the site in 2021. They made the inception of Stonelynk Organics possible, they encouraged us along the way, and they continue to be loyal and supportive customers to this day. Not only that, they have committed their careers to campaigning for good ecological food through the Soil Association, Green and Blacks Chocolate, and wholefood marketing. Without them we simply could not have got Stonelynk Organics to where it is today.
They live in Hastings and continue to be rooted in the community, often contributing to local events – and have their own amazing garden to boot.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply