A Garden Good Enough To Eat

Bringing together a love of food and gardening, padstow kitchen garden is already a firm favourite with cornwall’s top chefs, as Louise Danks discovers.

- Louise Danks

COVERING five acres on a gentle slope leading down to the banks of the River Camel, Padstow Kitchen Garden was born out of combining two passions, gardening and food. With the trend for micro salad leaves and baby vegetables, along with a resurgence of growing your own, an awareness of food miles and consumers having a more ethical relationship with their food, it’s not a surprise that a local, kitchen garden is doing so well.

‘The farm has been in the family since the mid-1800s but my parents encouraged me to try a different career,’ explains Ross Geach, Padstow Kitchen Garden’s owner. ‘I fell into cheffing after washing dishes in restaurants around Padstow. I really enjoyed the buzz of working in a kitchen and so I went back to college and trained as a chef. I started at the bottom and worked for Rick Stein and I became head chef in his Seafood Café.

‘I fell in love with food, I loved the ingredients but I started to enjoy the late nights working in the restaurant less and less,’ he explains. ‘I ended up spending all of my spare time developing the kitchen garden and working with my granddad, loving gardening and learning about vegetables. I didn’t know anything about growing when I started; I spent hours talking to other gardeners, reading and Googling to build up my knowledge.

‘But I did know about food and what chefs wanted; I know how chefs like produce presented, when they need the crops delivered and that they like to be emailed and texted rather than phoned.’

He holds early memories of gardening when Padstow Kitchen Garden was a germ of an idea close. ‘I remember sowing some beetroot with my granddad, I sold the thinnings to a restaurant and we harvested the beetroot while they were still golf-ball sized rather than waiting for them to be a larger, more traditional size for harvesting. My granddad couldn’t believe it!’