Gretchen Kimball, the Restaurant at Meadowood
Gretchen Kimball grew up in Napa Valley, where she attended the valley’s first Montessori school. “My career path started there,” she says. “I was always in the school garden.” What she saw inspired her artistically. Immediately out of high school, she set out to explore the world of landscape design, fine art and languages, which took her to five schools in four countries over a 12-year period.
Everywhere she went, she put down roots in the form of a small garden. “Window boxes, pots on fire escapes,” she says. “In Mexico, I planted a small plot of empty land next to my house.”
After she married, Kimball returned to Napa Valley in 2005, where she and her husband purchased undeveloped acreage in the western hills. Wanting to be more hands-on regarding its development, she enrolled in a course in landscape design at UC Berkeley, studies that have enhanced the pleinair painting retreats she offers in exclusive valley locations.
In 2009, she began an internship at the Napa Valley Reserve, a private membership winery estate just outside the Meadowood gatehouse. The Reserve’s property includes a showcase kitchen garden used by the Reserve and the Restaurant at Meadowood. In close consultation with chef Christopher Kostow and his culinary team, Kimball planted the fall garden that year.
Two and a half years later, Kimball, 36, is the reserve’s head gardener, responsible for “everything you see growing here except for the vines,” she says. Nearby, on land leased from a Montessori school, she oversees a small farm that produces experimental herbs and vegetables as well as large plantings of tried-andtrue varieties.
Additional help comes from a crew of two and restaurant staff. Chef, sous chefs, line cooks and servers all volunteer time on scheduled days. “The result is a tight connection between the garden and the restaurant that’s passed on to restaurant guests by servers able to talk about ingredients with firsthand knowledge,” she says.
Radishes, turnips, carrots and a continuous succession of greens are all harvested at micro size. When deciding what to grow, items that are expensive and hard to come by get priority. Marigold blossoms, for example, are “oddly expensive.” Borage, an herb that produces blue, starshaped edible flowers, is a staple. “Chef, who never looks at any ingredient in a conventional way, uses every aspect of the plant,” she says. “Stem, leaves, flowers.”
Kimball enjoys the happy coincidence that Meadowood’s farm garden is adjacent to the valley’s newest Montessori school and its garden. “Montessori to Montessori — my career path has come full circle.”
Cynthia Sandberg didn’t know an annual from a perennial when she enrolled in a horticulture course at a community college with the idea of “prettying up” her tract house in Capitola. Interest grew as she took class after class while working as a trial attorney.
Her hobby evolved into a passion with a move to a century-old Ben Lomond farmhouse where she planted a vegetable garden. “I fell in love with tomatoes,” she says. Sandberg had such success propagating her first 10 varieties from seed that she ended up with hundreds of plants. She stocked a table at the end of her driveway and sold the surplus for $1 apiece: “Seed money to try yet more tomato varieties,” she says.
Sandberg eventually quit her law career to concentrate on the garden, specializing in heirloom tomato varieties, and the plant sale became an annual event. “I began to be known as the crazy tomato lady in the mountains,” she says.
But it was a birthday dinner at Manresa in 2006 that sealed her fate.
Halfway through the tasting menu, chef David Kinch approached the table and asked her if she would bring him some of her tomatoes. Love Apple Farms’ exclusive relationship with the restaurant blossomed.
Sandberg’s farm grows 100 percent of the produce Kinch puts on every plate year round and is currently expanding into raising pigs, turkeys, chickens, rabbits and sheep for the restaurant.
Early in 2011, she moved to a steep site in the Santa Cruz Mountains just 15 minutes from Manresa. Once a vineyard terraced for optimal southern exposure, it now is lined with beds overflowing with some 300 cultivars of biodynamically grown fruit, vegetables, herbs and edible flowers. Kinch, en route from his Santa Cruz home to the Los Gatos restaurant, loads the day’s harvest into his Volvo station wagon.
In addition to running the annual tomato plant sales, which cover the “love apple” alphabet from ‘Amana Orange’ to yellow pear, the onetime horticulture student is now a teacher. Sandberg offers workshops at the farm throughout the year on everything from gopher control to backyard chicken keeping to, of course, how to build the perfect tomato cage.