When I arrive at the farm in Cardinia, Blayne is out on the rotary hoe. Blayne is the head chef at O.MY, the restaurant he owns and runs with his brother, Chase, in Beaconsfield, and he is absolutely the poster guy for living life like it’s golden. He exudes joy, satisfaction and vision and I hang off his every word. O.MY has two hats but flies relatively under the radar in terms of publicity. For six years, these brothers have been putting in the hard yards, growing the food they plate up in their restaurant and absolutely loving life.
It’s a beautiful day for it.
It’s gorgeous out here.
Basically, Robbie who owns this place is my brother’s fiancee’s dad. About six years ago we opened the place and he did our books for us, randomly. He was an ex-police detective of about 30 years and he built this whole place himself. He’s a bit of a Jack of all trades. He’s into horticulture and permaculture as well. As soon as we got started, we got along straightaway and started planting garden beds. It was early days but eventually we realised we could do it on a large scale where we thought we might able to supply the whole restaurant with it and that’s what we do now.
We renovated the restaurant for six months before we started so it has all been pretty crazy. Now we are at a point where we are supplying the restaurant one hundred per cent with our own produce. We don’t buy anything in any more; other than meat and dairy and the basic essentials like baking paper, sugar, flour. We’re working on getting to all that too down the track.
Really?
Absolutely. That’s the aim. The aim is to eventually have a big enough property in the next four or five years to do everything ourselves and buy nothing in at all.
Did you know how to do all this when you started?
Not really. It has been a learning process. We have always been passionate about it and always loved it and I guess when we started cooking, we started building a few small gardens for the restaurant and I thought, I wish we could grow more so I could do a dish of it. It all comes down to why I want to do it so badly now, is because I’ve done a lot of dishes that have a meat component with some of our vegetables on the side and you don’t get the same feeling to that dish as you would off a dish that you’ve had to work on six months first in the garden. Sometimes it’s a year.
I totally agree. I had a chat to Annie Smithers who is out at Trentham at Du Fermier and she had a small acre where she supplied 90% of what she cooked and then moved to a much bigger acreage at Babbington Park. She said that when you nurture something thrugh from a seed, and then put it on the plate, you have so much more respect for it and you are less likely to waste anything. Same thing for Alejandro at Pastuso. He doesn’t have a garden but takes his chefs out to Gippsland and gets them to see what actually happens. If it just comes in from the supplier, you’re a bit more disconnected.
It changes your perspective. What I’ve realised with our chefs, because they work here as well, on the farm, all of the sudden they’re coming up to me and saying, what are we going to do with this skin, what are we going to do with the roots, with all these other parts. It’s literally like that, it’s a different way of looking at a vegetable with more value. That doesn’t mean that I think it’s bad what other chefs are doing, I just think it is really different the way we look at our food. For us, it pushes our dishes for us. I’ll pick something…I’ll grow 2000 carrots, but it’s only 2000 carrots. It sounds like a lot, but 150 people a week, at three or four carrots per person, you move through the carrots very quickly. You might only have that dish on for six or seven weeks. It’s not as though you can break the carrot up and get the best bits and throw half of it out, which is generally what you do with carrot dishes. For us it’s about serving the whole carrot or finding a way for it to be respected.
How do you work that out? I know chefs who have worked at Bray or The Fat Duck learn that because he has that use it all and use it in a different way approach. Have you come up with ways yourself of fully using the whole vegetable?
The way we look at it is just because of the growing side of things, because there is so much work involved. The radish dish we have on at the moment is literally three radishes on a plate, blistered. It’s my favourite dish for a few reasons. It’s the best way to try and explain to people the growing procedures behind a simple radish dish like that. For that radish dish, we need 22 garden beds on rotation, 60 metres squared of space and every single week we poke 1000 holes in the ground and plant 1000 seeds and they could take about eight weeks to grow so to have that dish on the menu…Heston and all those chefs, I love them, but they get their radishes brought into the kitchen and they don’t know where they come from and what the amount of work is and then they take that radish and turn it into all different things. That’s amazing, don’t get me wrong. For me, I’m not doing anything to that because it’s perfect. It’s literally as perfect as it’s ever going to be. I love it for what it is. It’s as simple as that. Most of the dishes we do are as simple as that. They’re not too technical or overworked. They are usually just trying to use the whole ingredient, if we were to cut it up. You can’t really serve a carrot with the carrot top because they’re not very yummy. But we make carrot top pesto out of those. When you grow your own carrots organically like we do, you can use the tops. The other ones you can use but they spray them a fair bit. Our carrot tops are yummy because they’re young. We pick all our carrots at a certain age, probably 150 days old. They’re not massive but they’re a bit sweeter and the tops a bit sweeter too. They haven’t gone bitter yet.
I sowed carrots this winter. I’m not a very good gardener and I sowed them too close together so there was a whole lot of busy carrot tops and tiny carrots. I’m going to use the carrot tops!
We sow ours pretty close together because we’ve decided to harvest them when they’re young and do dishes of small carrots.
I roasted ours and they were so sweet and all knobbly.
How good are they? Weird and random. They’re so good. We use the stems, the middle bit, for compost. We have a huge compost system. I’ll show you around.
I designed the garden like a kitchen. I knew how I wanted the beds and they’re numbered and dated and labelled.
Do you have bee hives? Oh yes you do.
Yeah, we get all our honey from there.
All around here we have all our broad beans. There is probably close to 500 broad bean plants and that will be for one dish that lasts a month.
Wow.
That’s the thing about what we do that’s unique and different. Sometimes it’s a little bit upsetting in a way because you grow these broad beans – they’ve been growing for nearly a month and when they’re ready, I’ll pull them and that’s them done; three months of work which will last a month on a menu like this.
And they have to be replanted every year?
Yes. We’ll run cucumbers in there when we’ve pulled the broad beans. We have a whole rotation plan for the year. This is our orchard. There are about 35 to 40 trees in their third year. They’ll do something this year. Last year we had some good nectarines. There’s not a hell of a lot of production out of the apples yet, but this year is going to be the year, I reckon. We’ve pruned them right back. Robbie is kinda the brains behind it all, he’s the real deal. He keeps everything neat and beautiful.
I designed the garden like a kitchen. I knew how I wanted the beds and they’re numbered and dated and labelled.
Do you have a map?
Yes. It’s so I can control it like a kitchen. At the start of each year I basically write out what I want for each season and turning over beds. I wanted 14 beds of cabbage and that’s what we have, 14 beds with about 200 cabbages. There were another 200 over there and another 200 over here. We went for 600 cabbages this year, which we did, and now we are onto our last 200.
Are you affected by weather and bugs?
We always get affected by bugs and weather but it all really comes down to soil for us. That’s the big one. We concentrate on healthy soil. There’s our compost over there. We’ve been doing this for over three years now, so we have really strong soil. All of these beds are 50/50 with our own compost and a really good high-quality mushroom mulch. We get some really good things from it. We get some bugs but we compete against them with natural sprays that we make out of garlic and so on. We try our best with that. We also net a lot of our stuff. We built proper netting to keep the brassica butterfly out. While we were bringing up the cabbage we had every single one of these beds with nets over it. It took us a lot of work to get the nets done but once we did they couldn’t get in and lay their eggs so we’ve ended up with a good product. It just all takes time.
How many days of the week are you here?
I’m pretty much here all the time. I have a part-time gardener, Willem, plus a helper and Robbie does a fair bit and the chefs rotate through here and I have a few other people who help out in terms of picking. We’ve managed to make it work. I also have to work nights in the kitchen obviously. I have to work out how to stay alive in it all but I absolutely love it. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. So this is how we go about it and it just works.
You’ve got hens as well.
We’ve got about 26 over there, we’re actually selling those ones, they’re on their third year. This morning we got 50 brand new chickens. It’s a lot of chickens.
How many eggs does that give you?
In this season, depending on their age, they’re only thirteen months old, these ones, but they’ll produce probably 15 dozen a week. I salt most of them. We rely on our eggs and don’t buy in any eggs at all. So when we go into this peak season that we’re about to go into when they start laying, we get a lot of eggs but in winter it drops right off and we only get 4 or 5 dozen. It puts us under pressure because we can’t do certain dishes. We can’t do pastries or anything that relies on eggs. It’s great because it makes you think about a different way.
It’s another element of seasonal, isn’t it?
That same element applies to everything we do. Obviously that’s all the peas we have and we have so many customers so we have to think whether we want a dish that runs for a couple of weeks or one that runs for three days but it’s really good. We have to make these decisions.
It’s a 25-seater, isn’t it? And you’re doing 150 a week?
It’s 30 seater because we have a back room as well. We have 6 services a week. 150-180 a week. When it’s really busy, it wipes the place out. We move through a lot of produce. We turn over the beds regularly.
This is all garlic here. That’s our supply for the whole year. Every time we throw garlic in stock or whatever, it’s our supply. We’ll end up hanging that in our root cellar at the restaurant. We also have our leeks and onions over there. There are a few staple things you want to cook with that we have to grow large volumes of in one go and then hopefully we store it well enough so it lasts for the year.
It’s a great way for us to cook and live. I love it. It’s such a natural way to go about it. It keeps it…not simple…it keeps it interesting. It’s a simple idea to follow; I’m not buying anything, this is what I’ve got, let’s make a menu of this and I take it to the chefs and we write a menu and do our thing and then the next week it changes. It keeps it fresh for all the chefs.
How long had you been cooking before you got into doing this?
I’ve been cooking for 13 years now. I was 15 when I started. Before this, seven years.
It’s not much in the scheme of things to then launch into such an ambitious project. Who were you working for?
All local restaurants, no top restaurants, local places in Beaconsfield. Then I went overseas for a little while. I didn’t work, just travelled and when I got back I really wanted to open up a little place where I could just do some food and that was it. I was 22 when we opened.
Do you do it with your brothers?
I’ve got three brothers all up. One of them isn’t involved, one isn’t involved any more, he’s just opened up a catering company on the side, which is cool. He went and travelled for a year as well. He opened it with us for the first three years and then dropped away because he wanted to travel. He’s really good at the catering side of things and loves doing weddings and all that. My youngest brother, Chase, runs the floor and he’s an absolute machine. I’m biased, but I reckon he’s the best Maitre d’ in Australia, certainly in Melbourne. He’s a sommelier as well. He’s done a lot of training as well. He’s only 24, so he’s young, but he has a way with people. People come back to the restaurant for him. They don’t even come back for the food half the time. It’s hilarious. People love him and he loves people. He’s real.
This is my life and I get to put up art work every night of my own stuff in terms of what I’ve created. If I have something in my head, I can put it on a plate and no one can say anything about it. It’s a beautiful thing.
Are the two hats what you were after, that kind of acknowledgement?
Success isn’t about money for us, it’s not about the reputation or fame. It’s about us knowing what we are doing it for. It’s our life. I eat from here. This is what I take home and eat with my girlfriend. I have my own gardens at home too. This is my life and I get to put up art work every night of my own stuff in terms of what I’ve created. If I have something in my head, I can put it on a plate and no one can say anything about it. It’s a beautiful thing.
The hats and everything came along because of us just being completely satisfied with who we are and what we’re doing. It’s not us trying to source that. We don’t do VIP treatment. I think it’s poisoning the industry but that’s another story for another time. Anyone who comes to the restaurant is as important as anyone else. We’ve had reviewers in and we give them the same menu and the same level of attention. Across our industry, that’s not done. It’s important for me that people get treated the same across the board. Imagine if you’re taking all the chef’s attention and what about all the other people who have maybe booked three months in advance, saved up the money, got a babysitter for the night. Maybe they’re a young family, first night out since they’ve had kids and yet they’re not as important as someone else. That’s my stance. Having that attitude, right across the board with all our staff, front of house, back of house, Chase and I especially, has been the best thing we’ve ever done.
I guess it means that you are consistently you. You’re authentic and true to what you want.
I love it. The relationship we have with our vegetables is so important. It resonates right the way through everyone who is involved with the place. Front of House, especially. The biggest part of what we do, obviously we grow it all and so much work goes into it but then there’s this other side when we try to get that to you at the table in the restaurant. You can’t see the farm. The restaurant isn’t at the farm so we have to organically and not in a structured or scripted way tell people about how important what they’re about to eat is. Our Front of House feel it, they’ve all been here and seen it and done it and they’re able to transfer that to you when you eat. When people actually understand the importance of everything and the cycle of everything, it changes the whole game. A simple radish dish is elevated into something that is more special and has meaning.
I’ll show you the compost now. Our compost is literally offcuts and anything we can’t use in the kitchen goes into compost and anything else goes to the chickens so we have a nice cycle of products in the restaurant. It’s great for the soil. It was 50 degrees in there the other day right in the heart of there so it’s absolutely pumping.
These beds here are getting ready for tomatoes. We’re doing 30 beds. This year we’re doing something different. We’re having 30 beds, one bed for each variety of tomato. We’re going to do a little dish of 30 varieties of tomato. It’s a lot of work.
Are you growing them from seed?
Yes. And collected seed, mainly. I did buy some new ones this year because you have to refresh every few years. Then we’re doing another 15 beds of another special variety of tomato that we have the seeds for and no one else does because we got them sneakily from overseas. They’re diamond tomatoes. They’re tiny. We’re going to try and grow heaps of those. Whether they work or not…we’ll see.
Where are they from originally?
Willem got them from a guy in Greece years and years ago who squished them out into his sock and brought them over from Greece and kept the seed that way. Willem grew some and gave me some, I collected them and this is all over the space of about five years so we think we have enough to do some beds this year which is cool.
This is our berry patch. It gets netted all the way round. There are strawberries down the sides, raspberries down the middle, currants through there and blueberries and blackberries. This will be our biggest year. These are three and a half year olds so we’ll have huge production.
In terms of water, do you have irrigation?
All along the rooves are catchments and that all goes into a water tank that runs a line all the way to the dam so when that fills up, it pushes the water into the dam and the dam is also connected to all the taps along here as well. We also have two other ran water tanks. We don’t have any mains water here. We rely completely on what we get at this time of year which hasn’t been that great. We’re hoping for some late spring rain. We mulch everything well, so we don’t have to water too heavily.
Around all these arbours, are hops plants as well. We’re growing about 80 hops plants because we make our own beer as well. In a couple of years time we’ll do our own farm hops beer once they’re a bit older. We’ve made three beers from this one. They’re really good but only small scale stuff that we drink ourselves as a trial while we’re learning how to do it.
So then what’s next, a vineyard?
Probably. Chase would. Chase has made his own bottle of wine. He’s making another one with two other winemakers. Eventually we want to have everything on one big property, so sugar, wheat, wine, beer and try and do it all for a small amount of people. Keep it simple but everything you have comes from here and everything has a story behind it. Everything made by us and unique. That’s what we want to do so we’ll see how we go. It’s a lot of hard work to go but we’ll get there.
Listen to the chat (and the wind!) here.
23 Woods Street, Beaconsfield