THE EXPLAINER
In his new book, From The Earth, Peter Gilmore celebrates heirloom vegetables – and the magic of growing your own.
Peter Gilmore on rare heirloom vegetables and the Japanese red turnip.
Iplanted my first vegetable garden about 12 years ago when, for the first time in my adult life, I moved into a house with a reasonably sized backyard. I started with a herb garden, experimented with a few vegetables and was hooked. You plant a small seed – a pea, say – into the soil and, within a few days, a green shoot appears from the earth. It grows, climbing a trellis and bursting into flower. These flowers then attract insects for pollination. Small pea pods begin to emerge and, as they grow, young peas develop inside the pods. It’s hard to believe that planting just one seed creates so much life, beauty and sustenance. If the pods are left on the plant and allowed to mature further, the peas will eventually dry, providing hundreds of new seeds, which can be saved, stored and used to grow new plants for next season. Of course, I knew this was how it worked, but I hadn’t experienced it firsthand before. I just hadn’t realised how wonderful the process was – what a truly, deeply amazing gift nature provides us.
Then I discovered just how many remarkable varieties of vegetables are actually available.
I started to devour seed catalogues and my humble garden bed grew to take over the whole of the backyard including my sons’ soccer pitch, which they were not impressed with. I remember buying them a trampoline to make up for it, but it wasn’t long before I was planting potatoes underneath it.
As a chef, I also began to question why I couldn’t buy some of the varieties I was growing for the restaurant. I wanted to use purple and white carrots, and some of the amazing varieties of radishes – the ones that were the colour of ripe watermelon inside – as well as the beautiful flowers of the peas I was growing. Back then I couldn’t find these in the Australian marketplace, so I met with a couple of market farmers close to Sydney and asked, “Would you grow multi-coloured carrots and pea flowers for me?” but was met with, “Carrots are orange, mate” and “No, I’m not going to grow a field of peas for you and go out each morning and pick flowers.”
Eventually I found like-minded, passionate, small-scale growers who were prepared to grow more unusual, often heirloom, varieties for the restaurant and I was willing to pay a premium for them. It gave me a much wider palette of beautiful ingredients to work from and the deal gave them a new market and a better livelihood. It was the beginning of a revolution, a direct relationship between farmer and restaurant with no middleman. Of course this type of thing had been happening in Europe for decades but it wasn’t really happening in Australia. Most city restaurants simply placed an order with a fruit and vegetable distributor who just bought what was available at the markets. My small-scale farmers gradually were able to start supplying other restaurants directly. Fast-forward a decade and a lot of the produce that I wasn’t able to buy back then is now much more readily available. I feel very proud that I have played a small part in the growth of this diversity.
Now, in my “test garden”, I grow as many new vegetable varieties as I can find to see what’s useful, flavourful and interesting. I love working closely with my great network of small-scale farmers; we plan what they will grow for me each season, which means I also need to plan my menus months ahead. It can be a challenge and I have to be prepared to change my menu if things do not go to plan. But when it all comes together, it is quite magical.