“It’s very hard to compete with the supermarket flavours, that’s why the jams I make are a little bit different”

On the Hella’s Kitchen market stall is a long row of jam jars with handwritten labels.

There’s an apple strudel jam, like the dessert filling without the pastry, says Hella Toolan. “It has apples with toasted almonds, lots of cinnamon, lemon zest and vanilla.”

It’s citrus season, so there are Seville orange marmalades, one with ginger and one with lemon balm, and a pink grapefruit marmalade too.

It’s the third Saturday of the year, but it is Toolan’s first outing of 2024 to the regular market at Skerries Mills where, every Saturday, between eight and 20 traders gather to offer organic vegetables, artisanal cheese, raw milk, kombucha, gluten-free baked goods, grass-fed meat, preserves, pantry staples and crafts.

A one-woman show, it takes Toolan two weeks after Christmas to ramp up production again, she says.

Rather than grow and grow, Toolan has chosen to stay small and special, selling through six cafes and farm shops along the north Dublin coast and one in Dún Laoghaire.

Places like Olive Deli in Skerries, Jones’ Garden Centre in Donabate and the Guilty Goat Coffee Co in Rush.

Sure, staying small means she can’t make more than she is now, she says, but she is also clear on her goals. “I want to keep it a one-woman business.”

Partly, so she has more family time, says Toolan. And “I don’t want to branch out because that would mean I have to move out of my kitchen”.

Something different

“I have raspberries with dark chocolate jam or strawberries with lemon and lime,” said Toolan, to a browsing customer last Saturday.

No plain strawberry or raspberry flavours? Says the customer, a white-haired woman in a black jacket.

“No, it’s very hard to compete with the supermarket flavours, that’s why the jams I make are a little bit different,” says Toolan.

At other times of year, she would have an even greater mix, she says, with 15 or so jams. “I would have the most variety towards summer.”

Her summer specials include strawberry with prosecco, or raspberry with pink gin.

“I don’t have everything all the time, and sometimes that makes customers confused. But they are very understanding if you tell them, ‘I’m sorry that’s not yet in season’, ” she says.

Toolan sources her apples, tomatoes, pears, rhubarb, beetroot, and gooseberries from the area.

She has a few farmers she can go to, she says. “For example Adam and Eve, they grow rhubarb. I can always go there and cut my own rhubarb.”

They are connections that have grown organically with time, through word of mouth and community.

“At school, where another mum would ask: do you know Fionnuala here? She is the wife of the tomato family, you should talk to her,” says Toolan.

People approach her to give produce. They might have a plum tree in their back garden and ask if she wants some fruit.

Farmers don’t ask for anything in return, says Toolan. But she still gives them samples of what she makes, a way of appreciating these open and friendly connections.

Meanwhile, after 15 years in business Toolan says she feels she has a responsibility to keep her customers supplied with their favourite jams and chutneys.

Some of her customers, like Colette Frawley-Bailey, have been Toolan’s customers for about five years.

She often orders brown bread and stocks up on pickles, her favourites. “I buy them because they are delicious and all homemade,” she says, as she grabs her bread and bags it.

A journey

Toolan used to be a teacher, and did her teaching degree in Germany, but then she moved to Ireland in 2003.

By 2008, she was a mother of two and started thinking about a different path. “I always liked to be at home and to be able to do all the other bits around the family,” she said.

She also felt the need to do something different for herself, she says, so seized the opportunity at the weekends to create.

At first, her stall at Skerries Mills was a hotchpotch. “One or two flavours of jams, paintings for nursery rooms and little candles,” says Toolan.

She quickly learnt that food sold easier than art, she says.

On this recent Saturday, her spread also had preserved lemons, and a miscellany of chutneys – beetroot and apple or butternut and apple. There were chilli jam, pickles, rhubarb cordial, lemon and vanilla fudge, and brown bread.

While Toolan’s mum had always cooked jams, she had never really had an interest, she says, laughing. “I actually didn’t even eat that much jam either.”

But she got a few recipes and cookbooks from her mum and took the leap, setting up each Saturday at the Skerries Mills Farmers Market.

When it comes to transforming fresh produce into jams she has a routine to follow: wash, prepare, and freeze the fruit. “As it’s easier for me to cook from frozen,” she says.

Then to make the jam, you weigh up your fruit and add the same amount of sugar to the pot.

“To do jams, you need a certain amount of sugar to have the best outcome. Sugar is a preservative, if you have less sugar and more water content it’s more runny and it could get mouldy easier,” she says.

Having an affordable pitch to sell from is important, she says.

Soon after she started to go every Saturday, a former organiser left, she says. “At that time you had to pay €25 per Saturday, when you barely made between €25 and €40 a day.”

“I always felt that for a small business the charges are too high,” she said.

Stallholders chose to drop the fee in the Skerries Mills market to €10, deciding it would be a community project.

It was a slog at first, she says, as there were few stalls really so not that many people came, and – on the flipside – not many people came so there were few stallholders.

“There were only four, maybe five stalls: an organic farmer, someone selling German sausages, maybe the odd crafter came, and myself,” Toolan said.

It took 10 years to get the right number of stalls in, she says.

“Now we have a gluten-free baker, a cheesemonger, a milk vendor […] we are still a small number of stalls but,” says Toolan, with emphasis, “they were also persistent.”