How These Chefs Grow EVERYTHING for Their Restaurants | Discovery | Gardening Australia

My garden is a tropical food forest. You can just come out and pick and forage from, and it's abundant with life from the soil to the bugs and the birds. It's a gorgeous place to be. I'm near Port Douglas in far north Queensland, on the edge of Kuku Yulanji and Yirrakanji country. I'm visiting a large coastal property where the gardener has learned the importance of bending to the will of a sometimes intense tropical climate. It's just the way it is up here. You need to grow what grows in the wet and grow what grows in the dry. And it's an education in itself, knowing when to start that time of year and when to stop and when to start again. Across one and a half hectares, friends and business partners, Rachel Boone and Ben Wallace grow and harvest a huge range of edible tropical Southeast Asian plants. Almost everything they grow goes straight into the kitchens of their two local restaurants. So Rachel, you're the main gardener. I am. But you're both chefs. Yes. But Ben is the main chef. It was Rachel's dad who first bought this property 20 years ago and planted it out with Thai kitchen staples. After he moved back to Thailand, Rachel decided to move up North and tend the garden. I don't do much in this garden. I say that I am just a guardian of soil and birds in the ecosystem. And I just go with the flow because you have to up here. It's going to survive if it wants to be here. And you've got to be at peace with what grows in the tropics. And your garden is pretty resilient too. I mean, Cyclone Jasper came through and just flattened all the bananas, destroyed the lot. We go through these natural disasters up here and lots of rain, lots of dramatic weather systems. And then gardens get completely like smash. Now we're back. It's back. That's amazing. Like the amount of growth that has been put on, like you'd think it never happened. Right? That's the tropics for you. That's the tropics. And do you use banana much at the restaurant? We do. So we use the leaf for presentation and the banana bell blossom in salads. And what about the fruit? I eat the fruit myself or the chickens get that tasty snack. And everything else, I start the very beginnings of new garden beds to build the soil. So I lay down the banana trunk and leaves and start building that soil up and protecting that from the dry season. As in any successful garden, everything is governed by the seasons. And here in tropical far North Queensland, there really are only two. Dry and wet. So what is it like gardening in the wet? It rains every day for months, like hard, heavy, nonstop rain and humidity. You want to garden from like sunrise to 9am. You've got a three hour window. That's it without feeling overwhelmed with heat. And then you're done for the day. It's just too hot and rainy. And yeah, it's wild. But during that time, the garden just does what it wants. It's a growing food forest. Like it is green, it's lush. And when you talk about a food forest, is this what you mean? It is. I am using like companion planting. So I've got the moringa tree supporting the passion fruit. And at the base of the passion fruit, I have the pandan. So it's all just working together and supporting each other's growth. So now that we're in the dry season, how has your garden evolved? I have now just ripped out a lot of like the pumpkin from the wet. And what we want to start doing now is planting your more Mediterranean. So you can plant tomatoes and you can plant cucumber and cucumber melon and companion flowers like marigolds. And it's time to get in the garden and grow all these gorgeous dry season things. All that water and nutrients you're getting from the wet season here supports the dry season when you don't get any water. It at times can be quite exhausting, but it is beautiful. And without the wet, then you don't have the gorgeous dry. You need both to create this ecosystem. This is galangal. You can split this really easily. It's a fast growing plant up here. I cut these back really harsh and I use them for mulch or soil building. And we use the root in our red curry and yellow curry paste. And it's hot and spicy. So what is it about Thai food or Southeast Asian food that you're attracted to? So for me, it's mainly like the the flavor bomb that you can get from it, which I feel is not as one dimensional as Western food. There's a lot more things going on, sweet, sour, hot, salty, spicy. I'm half Thai. And growing up with Thai food, we always had a restaurant. My parents had a restaurant and we always had a garden. And I remember like my youngest memories of that garden sourcing some of the ingredients for the restaurants from there. And that's just continued in my life. And I enjoy it. Yeah. I started my apprenticeship quite young on the south coast of New South Wales. I really wanted to move to Europe to try working some Michelin star restaurants over there. So I went to England first and then over to France to work in a Michelin place there. And then after that, then I was in Sydney working at various restaurants and then was in Melbourne after that cooking. And now up here. Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of different climates. Yeah, it is. Yeah. This is definitely the hottest one. But is it the favorite one? It is. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So you guys have two restaurants and this garden supplies both of them. Yes. It's a lot of work, but it's so fulfilling. We're sourcing most of our aromatic herbs, all of our mackerel, lime leaf, lemongrass, beetle leaf, limes, curry leaf, curry leaf. The list goes on. While most chefs would have whole stalks of lemongrass delivered to the kitchen, small changes in the way Ben harvests ensures a steady supply. By cutting the lemongrass stalks above ground level rather than pulling them out completely, they'll continue to regrow for future harvests. Ben and I are really great at observing the change in our garden. And then with that, we then change our menus. That's where we share this great connection of teamwork, because I can grow and he can create. Thank goodness. So in the restaurant, what's something that you're really enjoying cooking at the moment? So we're lightly curing some coral trout, which is a local reef fish from the area. Then we're using what's in season from the garden. So at the moment, we've got fresh rosella, Thai basil, lemongrass. We've got the small Southeast Asian scud chilies, also using limes from the garden as well. And so we're kind of mixing that all together with a chili sauce and then just putting it on top of the beetle leaf. So it's just a flavor bomb. Oh, God, I'm like salivating. Having the connection with the restaurants and then having the garden, I don't think we could do it without the garden. Yeah, it's pretty good. Like you can just taste the difference from like growing stuff organically, the slow process, the flavors just way more intense. Obviously, Southeast Asian food, Thai food, that is my favorite. And to grow those herbs and those fruits that go into the food that we make and create, that's a special feeling for me. And being up here is awesome.