The Q&A: Mark Diacono, the plot-to-plate champion of unusual edibles and forgotten foods

Talking broken food systems, must-have herbs, and winging it, with the legendary food writer and grower

Hi, I’m Dan, and this is my alternative gardening newsletter, The Earthworm. Whether you’re a first-time reader or a long-time subscriber, thanks for being here. The Earthworm is a reader-supported publication. The two best ways you can support my work are to share this newsletter with a friend, and to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. And remember, the entire back catalogue of features, interviews, columns and more is freely available to all members of The Earthworm community. Why not take a scroll down memory lane?

Mark Diacono, in his home kitchen

Food isn’t just the way to the heart, but to the garden, too. That was certainly true in my case.

I can still remember the anxiety, the shame, of looking out into our back garden during those first couple of years after we’d moved into this house. Back then, neither my wife nor I had the slightest idea of what to do with the garden. All we knew was that it was going to take a lot of time, and a lot of sweat, to transform that overgrown, tangled mass of grass and weeds into any sort of usable space.

With a lot of help from our friends and family, we eventually managed to strip the garden right back to bare earth. The only survivors of our brutal cull: a mature box elder tree and one horribly unhealthy rose. Our garden is small, even by urban standards, but seeing that amount of empty soil was daunting, bordering on overwhelming. 

So we filled it with vegetables. Broccoli, cabbage, potatoes, courgettes, carrots, tomatoes, cucumber, chillies, French beans, and more. All purchased as £1 plug plants; most deceased before they’d borne fruit. But it was a start. We learnt so many lessons in our first summer of gardening, and it was all because the only way that we could get excited about the patch of mud at the back of our house was the thought that we might use it to grow our own food.

For me, food was the gateway to the garden. As it was for Mark Diacono. 

Like me, Mark came to gardening relatively late in life, his interest sparked by a homegrown spud. Unlike me, he very quickly turned his veg-growing hobby into a career, after acquiring a 17-acre plot of land in East Devon and converting it into a smallholding-come-nursery-come-horticultural education centre. 

Not long after Mark took over the site in 2004, Otter Farm reached legendary status, as a sort of mecca for cooks and gardeners alike. Specialising in unusual and “forgotten” foods, Otter Farm was home to blue honeysuckle, Japanese wineberries, dwarf apricots, giant red mustard, Mignonette strawberries, mirabelles, and American bladdernuts, among dozens of other species and varieties that you were unlikely to find anywhere else in the UK. 

Through the Otter Farm nursery (Mark and his family sold the original farm a few years ago), and through his own writing, Mark has become a champion for these unsung food crops, lost from our larders, gone from our gardens, vanished from our supermarket shelves. In books like ‘SOUR’, the award-winning ‘A Taste of the Unexpected’, or his most recent, ‘HERB/a cook’s companion’, weird and wonderful ingredients have been rescued from the culinary doldrums and infused with new purpose.

Mark’s passion for growing is infectious, and his penchant for a musical analogy charming (Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Jim and Van Morrison, all cameo in our conversation). But more than that, what I think makes Mark not just unusual, but special, is his chronic refusal to take the road most travelled – not down to defiance or petulance, but curiosity. A gut feeling that, just over there, just out of sight, might be something more interesting, more beautiful, more delicious.

I spoke to Mark last week via Zoom, me bleary-eyed and jet-lagged in London, he fresh-faced and full of beans from his home in Devon. It was an enlightening and far-reaching conversation (and one that I plan to share with you all as an audio file in an upcoming edition – an exciting first for The Earthworm!). We talked forgotten fruits, broken food systems, must-have herbs, and much, much more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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When did you get the bug for gardening, and specifically for growing your own food?

When I met my wife. She was a big gardener. I really wasn’t. But I had a garden, and so I was very attractive. I just did that thing blokes do of going: ‘spuds, that’s what we do, I’ll put some of those in the ground.’ And I got the bug. 

Then the real lightbulb moment for me was the first time I ate mulberries. I couldn’t believe that we all weren’t eating mulberries every day. Still the loveliest fruit I’ve ever eaten, and I realised I had to grow them myself if I wanted to eat them frequently. And then it was just that thing of, ‘what else am I going to do with them, other than shove them into my mouth greedily every August?’ And Jane Grigson was the answer. Her fruit and vegetable books to me were, and still are, absolute joys of cooking.

Hold on: the girlfriend and the house and the potatoes – was that really your first experience of gardening? Or were your family secretly keen gardeners, when you were growing up?

Yes, it was absolutely my first experience of any kind of gardening. I would’ve been in my early 30s. In my childhood, there were two fairly barren, yellow patches of where grass might supposedly exist – front and back of the house – and a cylindrical stack of apparently fire-worthy items, that might contain slippers, wrappings, everything, in the corner. And that was really it. There was no such thing as gardening that went on when I was a kid. I always thought it was a waste of time. Genuinely.

Some things haunt me really badly. One of them is, I have a really clear memory of watching Gardeners’ World. I must have been 13 or 14. And I really remember thinking, ‘jeez, if I ever get into this, somebody shoot me.’ I couldn’t understand it. I was like, ‘why would you mess around in a space around your house, creating this false environment, when there’s all this nature out there?’ 

I remember about the same age thinking, ‘how does anyone like Van Morrison over Jim Morrison?’ I couldn’t comprehend it. And then of course, fast forward a few years and you’re going, ‘wow, Van, yeah, love it.’ This is what happens. Our dislikes come back to haunt us. As one of my oldest friends said to me once: ‘The trouble is Mark, in the end, everybody loves Fleetwood Mac.’ It’s a great curse. 

Mark on Otter Farm. Photo © Jason Ingram

It still seems like a big leap to go from a few spuds to 17 acres of fruit and veg production – how did Otter Farm come about?

How it started, we got married. On the way home, we heard about this end of terrace house with 17 acres out the back. My wife went in the house, I went into the field. We then swapped briefly, and bought it. And I did again that thing men do of just running at it when you don’t know what you’re doing, and thinking: ‘Well, if I do it big enough, maybe it will carry me by its own momentum over the line.’ And that’s what I did, and that became Otter Farm.

A couple of weeks after we moved in, my wife said: ‘Woah, what’s this massive mortgage we’ve got? What are you doing, Diacono?’ Because she realised that I didn’t appear to have a plan. And all I could say was: ‘Mulberry’. And that’s literally how it all started. 

And again, Jane Grigson’s book. I went to look in it to see what to do with these mulberries that we’d grown, and getting to mulberries I got medlars, and thought, ‘they sound interesting. OK, I’ll order 10 of those.’ I just started looking and going, ‘crikey, someone’s growing Szechuan pepper – I’m going to try that.’ And that’s how things got added. I was still doing my job – this was just to be doing at the weekends and evenings.¹ And then it just took over. 

There was no real plan. I was not thinking at any point, ‘this will take over my real work’. I was just arsing around and spending very little money having a hobby – you know, spending a tenth of what I would if it had been golf, or something like that – and just enjoying it. And I started writing about it, as much as anything, on the blog, to remind myself of what I’d done. And there it is: it accidentally took over. Quite ridiculous, isn’t it?

It is a bit. What for you is the appeal of gardening?

I hate sentences that start ‘the older I get’, but, the older I get, the more I value that time I spend where I’m doing enough physically to occupy my brain into not looking for something else to do or think about, so that it then kind of uncouples from needing to find something to think about, and it makes leaps, and I think about things in a way that I don’t otherwise. 

And I find that a lot with gardening. Which is not to say that it’s an unthinking process, but a lot of it, you’re very happily pruning, planting, weeding, whatever it may be, and with the classic cliché ‘hands in the soil’ – which is again in itself so rewarding – but I do find that type of immersion frees the brain. Walking does that for me too. Walking walking, rather than just going down to the shops. And I really value those things, because my brain is always looking. It’s distractible.

You’re best known perhaps as a food writer, and for the amazing recipes in your cookbooks. Yet you don’t have any formal experience of working in professional kitchens. How did your work on Otter Farm develop into writing cookbooks and forming associations with fancy chefs?  

I started to blog about Otter Farm – so, I guess, your prototype Substack. This is 18 years ago. And I kept writing about it, and someone said: ‘Do you want to write a book?’ And there we are!

But I just wrote like I was me. I didn’t try and be anyone else, and that was really terrible at the start, and then it got better. And it’s the same with the cooking – you’re going, ‘I wonder if this will work with this’, and half the time the answer is a really big fat no, but if you play and read and taste and keep working it out, cooking is mostly a matter of getting some good ingredients and putting them sensitively together, doing as little harm as you can – the hippocratic oath applies in the kitchen too – and that’s really it. Do it for long enough and you get less crap. 

And also, I did that thing David Bowie was always half accused of, which was: just go near to people who are good at stuff, and let it rub off. Just go, ‘what do you do with this?’ Whether that’s virtually – in books and now online – or in person. 

I don’t want to put myself in the same category as you, because I’ve got, like, eight varieties of fruit and veg in my garden, but for those of us who have some experience of growing our own food, there’s a clear relationship between what we grow and what we eat. In the wider world, however, it seems like that connection is being eroded, if not completely severed. Does that worry you? Or actually, is it OK that not everyone knows what it is to grow something, and eat it?

No, I think it’s a really crucial thing. I remember right back in the days of River Cottage, when I was a bit involved there, there was a guy – I say ‘guy’, he was 13, 14 – he didn’t know where a potato came from. He’d supposed that they come from trees. I think it’s so crucial that we can teach, educate children, the next generation, about the fundamentals of life. Soil. The miniature biome that’s going on there – all life depends on those few centimetres of top soil. And that we teach them about how we get food from it ourselves, with as little embedded carbon and energy and water as we can, and heal that terribly fractured food system.

Who wants to be self-sufficient, for god’s sake? But I do think that even growing a small bit of food yourself, that magic is still there. I’ve been doing it for 20 years now, a little more, and I still can’t believe that that seed pops up into a brand new plant. As laughable as it sounds, it’s a crazy miracle. I look at it and go: ‘Are you serious?’ So yeah, I do think it’s hugely important, and a really easy thing to make some big wins on. 

How do you think that relationship became broken? What is preventing more people from having that connection with their food and where it comes from?

I think it’s a couple of things. School is kind of an easy one. I think it was in Ireland, it used to be compulsory that there was an allotment in the school. Something as simple as that, you think: ‘OK, easy win.’

But we’ve got such massive, massive forces coming the other way. On the one hand, they’re corporate. You know, you’ve got big interests in terms of supermarkets, but also bigger than that, you’ve got the corporations that own all of the varieties of this [crop], or they own the seeds. Everything about food production is owned by very few people. There’s 1,500 types of banana, yet we eat only one. All of this stuff is really powerful. 

But also, there’s something in us that wants to keep doing what we’ve done for the last however many thousand years, which is to increasingly specialise. So instead of being people who can go hunt, grow, cook, build, whatever, we go: ‘I’m going to get good at that thing, and I’m going to outsource all of the other stuff.’ And we don’t want to know about it. We just want to do our thing and free up time. And hence all of this stuff becomes strange to us. 

I think the combination of all of that, along with somebody constantly wanting to sell us the same season 365 days a year when we go out and shop, means we’re losing that connection. We can pull it back quite easily, I think, if there’s a will to; if there’s enough people in enough power. But that’s a big if. 

Photo © Jason Ingram

Through Otter Farm, you’re all about growing unusual or “forgotten” foods. What do you mean by forgotten? And why do you think certain things have come to be that way?

Forgotten stuff is really interesting because, at some point it would have been really widely used, and usually for a number of reasons that popularity has been lost. It might be that it doesn’t suit the current food system. So, mulberry is a great example of that. If you’re growing mulberries, or you’re down the road from mulberries, you can get them to your kitchen and you can eat them – happy days. If you’re going to make a stop at a centralised facility that then sends it out to various retailers, by the time you’ve done that, you’ve got only juice left, because they’re so delicate. So, a mulberry doesn’t suit the supermarket system, so we don’t eat them. It’s got nothing to do with their deliciousness.  

Or it could be something like a medlar, which is a kind of fruit that used to be really popular. It’s sort of like an apple that looks a bit odd, but it’s generally eaten half-soft, or even softer. And again, we’re not great at going, ‘hold on a minute, that looks like an apple that’s going off’. So I think there’s a number of reasons why things get forgotten, but ‘it doesn’t suit the supermarket system’ is nearly always it. 

And safety. Even if you look at something like potatoes: the seed potatoes that sell most are the ones that we know in the shops. I mean, by god, they’re an upgrade on the ones you buy in the shops because you get them from plot to plate really quickly, and all of that stuff. But there are so many, like International Kidney or Shetland Black, that are so different to the ones that you buy in the shops. We are tribute bands who like to sing someone else’s song, you know, and it’s lovely when you get away from it. It’s like, oh my god, there’s so much of this amazing food out there that breaks the unspoken rule that, ‘surely if it was that great, it would be in the supermarket’.

Exactly. There’s a kind of vicious cycle there, where consumer demand means that the supermarket is going to sell certain things, but because those are the only things they sell, they’re the only things consumers are buying, so all these other varieties drop by the wayside because no-one wants them, but they don’t want them because they don’t know that they can have them…

They don’t know that they can have them, and they don’t know what they can do with them. This is the other thing. And that’s really important. So, in that selfless way of mine, I keep writing recipes for stuff that nobody ever uses! And I love it. I often say this, but John Peel, the old DJ, one of his favourite bands was The Fall. He always used to say that if they brought out an album he didn’t like, he would presume that he didn’t know how it was good yet. And that’s such a nice way to come at every ingredient. You know, even if you really don’t like it, there’s always something where it will shine. Although lemon balm is testing my patience.

Let’s talk about your most recent book, Herb. Now, a lot of people might grow rosemary in their garden, and they might have a mint – though they might not necessarily want the mint that they’ve got – but generally speaking we probably don’t grow as many herbs as we could, or should. I feel like herbs are an under-sung member of both our kitchens and our gardens…

Totally that! They’re under-sung in every way: cooking and the garden. I couldn't agree more. These are the transformers. These are the clothes that other ingredients dress up in. And a handful of them by the back door will change every meal you eat. They’re so powerful. And if you're nervous about gardening or you’ve not grown herbs before, go for the perennial herbs that are very hard to kill, and very easy to get flavour from. 

I mean, what do we use? Rosemary, thyme, parsley, coriander, and that’s it. And we might go for lemon thyme if we’re a little bit swish; tarragon if we want it with chicken. But do we go for, I don’t know, chervil? Mostly not. Anise hyssop? Absolutely never. Nobody eats lovage. And these are all wildly easy herbs to grow.

If you’re not growing lemon verbena, then you’re denying yourself one of the great pleasures in the kitchen and on your hands. And something like sweet cicely is a forgotten one. It was used a lot centuries ago with sour fruit, because it’s gently aniseed but it gives the impression of sweetening. So if you have it with gooseberries, rhubarb, some of the currants, it seems to sweeten them, which means you can use less sugar, so it’s got even more reason to be enjoyed and loved now.

And I don’t know if you’ve grown or tasted shiso – it looks like a slightly papery nettle, and they come in Teddy-Boy-socks green, and a kind of deep purple, and the flavour is somewhere between mint and cumin. It’s extraordinary. One of those revelatory, delightful things.

A lot of the things that you sell via the Otter Farm nursery – almonds, Szechuan peppers, chocolate vines – sound very complicated to grow. Is that the case?

I mean, they are so rewarding to grow. When you harvest your first lot of almonds, you’re like, ‘aren’t I brilliant?’. But actually, all you’ve done is plant the bleeding things in the right place and occasionally strim underneath. It’s the plant that’s done all the work. This is the joy. 

Something like chocolate vine, Akebia quinata: lots of people grow it as a kind of scrambling, climbing thing. It’s called chocolate vine not because anything tastes of chocolate, but because the scent of the flower is chocolatey. But occasionally, in a good summer, you can get these large kiwi fruit-size fruits that you crack open and they have this lovely melon-flavoured pulp inside that’s just amazing. 

And even familiar things, like peaches. God. The first homegrown peach I ate, I remember every second of those few minutes. It literally felt like the first peach I’d ever eaten. 

It comes back to what you were saying earlier. Most of us seem to go, ‘I like Maris Piper potatoes, so I’ll try growing Maris Piper potatoes’. But in doing that, we’re denying ourselves the opportunity to enjoy this whole other world of food.

Seventy-eight percent of edible growing space in this country – so allotments, front gardens, wherever people are growing food – is dedicated to main crop spuds, carrot, onions, cabbage… All of which I like. But if you’re dedicating 78% of the space to the cheapest, most widely available, most disease-prone food you can think of, that tastes no different to the stuff that you can buy in the shops, what are you still buying? You’re buying the expensive stuff that tastes amazing if you grow it yourself.

We should be growing the expensive stuff. We should be widening our larder. And of course, yes, there may be to varying degrees a need to provide ourselves with more than flavour – we need volume, to reduce our food bills, and I really think that’s going to go crazy in the next year or so – but we can still do it in an interesting way. So if you’re going to grow tomatoes, I’d be growing Shimmer, and I’d be growing Honeycomb, and Costoluto Fiorentino – amazing varieties that you can’t buy in the shops. 

You sold the original Otter Farm and moved into a house down the road. In your home garden now, what’s your current approach? Do you still use it to grow food? Or do you have anything that’s just pointlessly beautiful?

So, we moved here two years ago and we actually did that thing of just leaving it alone to see what happens. I never thought I’d have the patience for that, but we totally did. And the lady who’d been here before, she’d planted some really interesting stuff, some really interesting herbs, lots of different varieties. It’s really fascinating to me to see herbs that I’m familiar with, and other stuff I’m not, in this other light. And yes, there is plenty of space for ‘pointless beauty’. A lot of it I would never have got in there, and maybe my wife wouldn’t either, but it works, and so it’ll stay.

Your approach has always been eco-friendly and sustainable – Otter Farm is known as ‘the climate change farm’ – which clearly is a morally good approach to growing. But are your results equally good? And if so, then why is there still so much resistance to adopting such an obviously beneficial model on a larger scale?

I couldn’t garden any other way. And yes, if you pay just a slight bit of attention to how you might deal with a problem rather than just hit it with a chemical, there’s no difficulty getting the same results. But I think that for me, and for most gardeners who garden even approaching that way, the result isn’t the only thing. 

The thing I get most from the garden isn’t just good results, but the doing of it. It’s a bit like fishing: I don’t mind if I don’t catch anything. Which is kind of bonkers, but it is the doing where there is so much reward.

You’ve very recently launched a Substack publication of your own which, as well as discussing everything to do with the garden and the kitchen, has already diverged into other areas, including a fascinating piece detailing the little-known history of one of the most iconic pianos in 20th century pop/rock music. Why did you join Substack? And what can people expect from The Imperfect Umbrella?

I used to blog. I was a very early adopter. As I said earlier, it was initially entirely for my own benefit, to record what I was doing. But it became the place where I learnt to write. 

And recently I’ve had this urge to get back to doing that. The thing that really appealed to me was that here was a place where I could write about whatever I wanted again, with the freedom of not having any other boss apart from me. 

The name is The Imperfect Umbrella because usually people want a title that is a nice, neat umbrella over everything you’re going to write – and I think there’s a lot of value in that, because then people can know what to expect – but the challenge for me, I think, is to keep people coming back even if they’re like: ‘I’m not interested in the piano. I’m not interested in lemon verbena.’ To stay and find out that maybe they are, after all.

To subscribe to The Imperfect Umbrella, tap here. You can check out Mark’s back catalogue of food and gardening books here. And to read more about Otter Farm, follow this link.

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Have you, like me, been inspired to ditch your go-to crops for some more unusual varieties? Have you ever tried growing any of the fruit, veg or herbs mentioned by Mark? Leave a comment and let me know!

1. Mark was working at the time in the South East as an environmental consultant.