The Craftsman’s Review ✦

Stories of British Craft & Kitchen

Advertorial · 3 days ago · By Fiona Ashdown

She spent 34 years watching what came off the fruit in a Kent packhouse. Now she won’t let her granddaughter eat a berry straight from the punnet.

At 69, Hilary Wellard knows something most of us never think about: the berries in your fridge were never washed. The bowl she made for her granddaughter became the most-asked-about thing on her market stall. Now the market has closed for the winter, and around 300 bowls are left.

Hilary Wellard (69) in her studio in Sheldwich, Kent, this October, with one of the last bowls from the autumn firing.

The orchards along the lanes into Sheldwich are nearly bare now. The Saturday farmers’ market closed for the winter a fortnight ago, and the folding table Hilary Wellard stood behind every weekend since May is leaning against the wall of her studio, an old brick apple store behind her cottage.

On the shelves above it sit the bowls, each with a small spout on one side. Hilary picks one up, drops in a handful of raspberries and turns the cold tap on into the spout.

The water doesn’t pour onto the berries. It runs in low along the side and starts to circle, and the whole handful turns slowly around the little cone in the middle. Bits of leaf drift out with the water. The raspberries come out whole.

“Everybody laughs the first time. Then they lean in to look at what’s left in the bottom of the bowl, and they stop laughing.”

She is 69. For 34 years, from 1987 until she retired in 2021, she worked the washing and grading lines at a fruit packhouse outside Faversham, standing beside water that carried apples and cherries from one end of the building to the other.

“I can tell you what comes off fruit,” she says. “Leaves, stalks, soil, grit. Little spiders, earwigs, midges. People think fruit comes out of the field clean. It doesn’t. It comes out of a field.”

The bowls started as one bowl, made for one little girl. A little over a year later, strangers stop her in the supermarket to ask about them. And because the market has closed for the winter, this is the first time they’ve been for sale online.

Thirty-four years on a packhouse line, and the one thing she learned about water

At the packhouse, nobody ever sprayed the fruit hard, because a strong jet bruises it. The fruit rode in channels of moving water, called flumes. “Nothing touches the fruit,” she says. “The water does the work. It tumbles everything a little, and whatever was on it lets go and goes with the water.”

Apples and cherries get that treatment. Berries mostly don’t. Strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are usually picked straight into the punnet they’re sold in, right in the field, and nobody washes them before the lid goes on. The first person to rinse them is you.

Field-packed and straight from the supermarket. Nobody washed these before the lid went on.

Hilary knew that. Her granddaughter didn’t.

Isla is four. She is what her mum, Hilary’s daughter Kirsty, calls “a berry monster”. Last summer Hilary watched her climb onto a kitchen chair, pull a punnet of blueberries out of the fridge and eat half of it before anyone noticed. Straight from the punnet.

“I knew exactly where those berries had been. And I knew what they had never been through.”

Hilary took up pottery when she retired. First a Tuesday-evening class at the village hall, then a second-hand wheel and a small kiln in the old apple store behind her cottage. That week she threw a small, deep bowl. Then she shaped a little spout to stand upright on the side of the bowl, so the water would come in low and run along the wall, the way it came into the flumes at the packhouse.

Hilary throws every bowl and sets every spout herself. The height and angle of the spout is the part she won’t let anyone else touch.

It took her eleven tries. Too low, and the water shot straight out through the holes. On the twelfth bowl, the water caught the wall and started to turn.

Isla named it the first afternoon. She stood on her stool at the sink, watched her blueberries go round and shouted for everyone to come and see “the berry-go-round”. She has washed every berry she has eaten since.

Hilary took two bowls to her market stall that Saturday, mostly as a joke. A woman bought both before nine. The next week there was a queue.

Word got round. Visitors took them home to London and Brighton and wrote asking for more, so Hilary started posting a few boxes a week from the studio. Until now there was no shop and no website, just that folding table in Sheldwich and a pile of letters on her kitchen table.

What makes Hilary’s bowl different

Most of us wash berries with a quick run under the tap, right in the plastic punnet. In one 2025 survey, about four in ten people who only rinse their produce said they rinse for ten seconds or less.

“The stream from your tap hits the top layer and goes straight out the bottom,” Hilary says. “The berries underneath barely get wet. Turn it up so it reaches them and it crushes your raspberries.”

Soaking isn’t much better. A vinegar bath can leave the fruit tasting of vinegar, and the berries sit in their own dirty water. Wash the whole punnet and put it back in the fridge wet, and it’s gone furry in two days.

Her bowl does what the flumes did. The water comes in low through the spout, follows the curved wall and starts circling on its own. The berries ride along in a cushion of water instead of being hit by it, turning so every side gets rinsed. Leaves and grit go out with the water through the holes around the cone, and the cone keeps the berries out of your plughole.

“I didn’t invent swirling water,” she says, before anyone can ask. “Every packhouse in Kent has used it for fifty years. All I did was put it in a bowl that fits under a kitchen tap.”

That is also why so many of the cheap copies online don’t work, she says. “If the spout sits too low or there are too many holes, the water runs straight out and never builds up. Then people say it doesn’t spin and it ends up in a drawer.” She sets every spout by hand and tests every finished bowl under the studio tap.

She is just as blunt about what it can’t do. The bowl is about 13 centimetres across and takes one good handful at a time. “Tip a whole punnet of strawberries in there and nothing is going to swirl,” she says. “Wash what you’re about to eat. The rest stays dry in the fridge and lasts longer.”

And she won’t make promises about chemicals. Strawberries regularly turn up near the top of the pesticide residue lists, and she knows plenty of her customers worry about that. “No rinse in the world gets out what’s inside a berry,” she says. “What I can get off is the soil, the bugs and whatever all those hands left behind. That I can do, and it does it better than I ever did with a colander.”

Some of them came back to her stall just to say thank you

Hilary keeps a shoebox of notes people have left for her at the market. She pulls out a card from August and reads it out loud.

“That one usually hangs on the fridge in the studio,” Hilary says. “That’s who they’re for. Not for a shelf. For somebody’s sink.”

The bowls come in four glazes that Hilary dips by hand: Shingle Cream, a speckled white like the shingle at Whitstable; Medway Blue, with blue running down from the rim; Weald Sage, a soft green; and Deep Cobalt. Every glaze runs a little differently in the kiln, so no two bowls are alike.

The four glazes from this autumn’s firing: Shingle Cream, Medway Blue, Weald Sage and Deep Cobalt. Each one is dipped by hand, so every bowl comes out a little different.

This is what’s left from the season

The market closed for the winter at the start of October. Hilary had fired one last big kiln load in September for the autumn crowds. Then the weather turned early and the last three Saturdays were rained off.

So most afternoons now go to packing. The bowls come down off the shelves, get tested under the tap and wrapped in paper. A notice with next year’s opening day in May is pinned to the wall above the sink.

The last bowls from the autumn firing, waiting to be packed. Every one is tested under the studio tap before it goes in a box.

What’s left comes to around 300 bowls. The kiln stays cold over the winter, the apple store is too cold to work in from December on, and there won’t be another firing this size before spring.

“I could keep them in boxes until May,” Hilary says. “But they’d sit in a cold shed all winter while people eat berries out of the punnet. That makes no sense to me.”

So she set one flat price for what’s left: £49 a bowl, down from the £79 they sold for on her stall. “I’m not doing this to get rich,” she says. “I want them in kitchens before Christmas. Half the people at the market bought them as presents.”

Her daughter Kirsty, Isla’s mum, is the one who put them online. “Mum makes the bowls,” she says. “I just answer the emails.”

The water comes in low through the spout and circles on its own. The raspberries ride along in it and come out whole.

The market won’t open again until May. When the bowls from the autumn firing are gone, that’s it until spring.

What customers say

Where to get one of Hilary’s bowls

The bowls are only available through Hilary’s own shop, the one place to get the real bowls from this autumn’s firing.

The market is closed until May, and what’s left from the autumn firing is all there is

“We’ll fire again in spring,” Hilary says. “But not like this. This was the big one.” When the last bowl from the September kiln load is gone, the shop closes until the market opens again.

Payment and delivery: The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand and dispatched within 1 to 2 working days. Every order comes with Hilary’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

One of Hilary’s bowls at home, where she always wanted them to end up: by the sink in the morning, on the table by lunch.

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DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full returns policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Rinsing with water helps remove surface soil, debris and insects; it does not remove pesticide residues inside the fruit, bacteria, viruses or parasites. Images are for illustration; because each piece is finished and glazed by hand, the final product may vary slightly.

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