Want the freshest produce possible for your restaurant? Start a vegetable garden next door. Here, as part of a series of organic Kiwi garden visits by POD Gardening, we take a walk with John Pountney, chef and proprietor at The Refreshment Room near Titirangi, Waitakere Ranges, Auckland.
I set up a garden for the Refreshment Room three years ago on a north-facing sunny slope near to the restaurant. Because we have solid clay soil - typical of the Waitakere Ranges - I made 12 raised beds, each about 50m long, and worked compost, seaweed and manure into the soil. I usually spend about two hours a week gardening - time-of-year dependent.
I like the idea of being a chef from start to finish. I'm a great believer in food from the ground up - so if I make food I want to make as many elements of that food myself.
Most chefs don't really know where produce comes from and the seasons that govern it. If you don't garden then you don't really get to understand about seasonal food. I grew up with two very good gardeners - my mum and grandmother but I learned nothing from them because I was young and arrogant and gardening was the last thing I was interested in as a teenager. Despite being exposed to so much knowledge I knew nothing when I started and so I had to teach myself everything.
I don't care if plants get eaten or attacked - that's fine with me, I just plant more. If plants die - they die, I'm not going to spray the underside of leaves or whatever. Birds are a pest in summer when they eat the tomatoes. But they get bored after a while because there is so much other food around. I definitely use no chemicals.
