AT THE western edge of the Blue Mountains in the heart of the Kanimbla Valley lies a small farm producing an incredibly varied range of fresh organic horticultural produce and nurtured by a passionate grower: Fabrice Rolando.
Mr Rolando now wears the hat of small farmer but has an extensive background in horticulture.
He trained as a horticulturalist in South Africa, and had spent some time working with the with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, and Mt Tomah, before running his own private practice designing and building gardens.
He had always wanted his own land, and five years ago the opportunity came up to set up a small horticulture farm in the Kanimbla Valley near Hartley.
He spent two years setting up infrastructure on the property and three years ago started growing produce, and First Farm Organics was born.
Today, Mr Rolando has three paddocks, each of about an acre, under cultivation, in addition to small orchard and olive groves.
And on that small portion of land he produces an impressively diverse range of produce in his market garden.
"The idea of a market garden is all about growing a diversity of crops," he said.
"It is almost like a kitchen garden, because I have really focused on the restaurant industry.
"Although it is organically grown it is a very intensive operation, but there's a lot of biodiversity - the intensity is in the diversity of the produce that's being grown."
Mr Rolando said he focuses on a number of intercropping practices – growing two crops in unison with each other - in order to best utilise the small space.
"If I'm growing brassicas, they are slower growing, and in between the brassicas I will put something that is much quicker growing, like a raddish or a turnip - and get two crops out of one amount of effort."
He also plants some vegetables between trees in his orchard to utilise that space too.
Mr Rolando's produce includes heirloom vegetables and tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, three types of currants, squash, leek, garlic, turnip, zucchinis, cucumbers and rhubarb, just to name a few.
"How I've tried to structure the farm is that each season needs to have a showcase vegetable, so I've done asparagus for spring, and I'll move into garlic for the December/Christmas period."
He supplies produce for high end Sydney restaurants as well as to the local area.
"The vegetables do filter down into the local community, my wife is very adamant that this food doesn't just go to high-end restaurants but also goes into the immediate community," he said.
He said in the same way some chefs look at using meat from snout to tail, he wanted to encourage the use of horticultural produce from root to seed.
"If you have the time - and this is where the quantum shift is from industrialised farming - I am looking at it from a very different view.
"How can extract the same, if not more, value from one plant?
"I am doing a Portuguese cabbage at the moment where I am selling the baby leaves, the big leaves, the flowers, the brassica stem.
"Each time you introduce that to the chefs then they try it out in their kitchen and they see what they can do, and you get that feedback, so it really is a collaborative effort between chef and grower."
He said it was about re-educating the public that vegetables weren't just a narrow spectrum, it's a much broader spectrum.
"We need to teach chefs to think like farmers, and we need to teach farmers how to think like chefs, because it is all about the seasonality," he said.
"I think small operations like this is a start of a new generation of thinking about how we can still be smart and still make money, and still maintain our lifestyle, but thinking beyond the square.
"So instead of just selling the cabbage, we are selling the big leaf, small leaf, the heart, the flower, the stem - selling or sorts of different things out of the one product."
With Christmas around the corner, Mr Rolando said he had a wide range of produce becoming available, including garlic, different types of squash, tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers, capsicum and chili.
"One of my things this Christmas are going to be my red currants and white currants, so I will sell them as a red and white currant mix.
"But It's almost time now for me to stop thinking what's going to happen in summer, I almost have to think about what I'm going to do for autumn."
He said that aside from having a grower hat, it was important to wear the marketing hat as well.
"On Saturdays I do deliveries to Sydney and I meet with the chefs.
"It is very much a one to one relationship, because I need feedback from them and they need feedback from me."
