Recipes from Potager garden and glasshouse café, Cornwall "I saw I'd come somewhere very special," Mark Harris, who rented a studio in 2006, says. Brought up in East Sussex, he studied chemistry at the University of Leeds. After he graduated, he moved to Falmouth to do a boatbuilding course. By 2006 he had built a Mevagissey Tosher fishing boat and was about to build a second when he heard about Potager. "There is something about the atmosphere," Harris says. But in 2008 Thomas and Skerrett decided to sell up. "They both had full-time jobs, the garden was a lot of work and they were losing enthusiasm," Harris recalls. So he stepped in, and bought an 80 per cent share in Potager for £200,000. Thomas and Skerrett own the rest and still have a studio in the garden. "This was only made possible by my father's death six months before I moved to Cornwall," Harris says. His father left him £80,000 and he borrowed £120,000 from his mother. Dad's ashes are buried under the apple tree. Today, Potager is thriving. Harris is forever mending and installing things. He has converted a derelict greenhouse into new studios and has increased the number of artists working here to 10. His girlfriend, Saffa Perry - "We met through rock-climbing" - looks after the garden, which combines the perfection of the potager - all neat geometric beds of chard, rocket, rhubarb, bay trees, blackcurrants, sunflowers - with oddball relics from the past, such as an over-thick hedge of laurel. "They were potted trees that were meant to be bought from the nursery," Harris says. Awen McBride first came to Potager more than five years ago. My sister, who is a chef, saw in a magazine that Dan and Pete were looking for someone to help with the garden and in exchange there was accommodation. It's a beautiful place and I wanted to be part of what is going on here, because I like the vibe. At first Dan and Pete were running the cafe alongside their jobs and after a while it became too much and I stepped in, but the cafe was only open on Sundays then. McBride, "brought up on meat," became a vegetarian in his late teens for health reasons, and has experimented with veganism (he is lactose-intolerant) and raw foodism (uncooked, unprocessed, largely organic food). He says he is interested in bringing complex construction to vegetarian food, creating great celebrations of taste and texture. I don't think really good vegetarian food is very developed yet. Covering breakfast, lunch and tea (and occasional evening meals) at the weekend only, the menu is 'spontaneous and inventive," McBride says, and evolves from what is available in the garden (mainly herbs, haricot beans, tomatoes, courgettes) and McBride and Tugwell's vegetable patch at home in Port Navas, combined with ingredients from such places as Cusgarne, an organic farm near Truro. Typical dishes include green vegetable soup with roasted garlic and beetroot relish served with homemade spelt rolls, and a butter bean 'orangey stew" topped with roasted butternut squash, swede with fennel seeds, rosemary, garlic, hazelnuts and cheddar. Tugwell's 'healthy cakes" are characteristic of Potager. She uses soya spread instead of butter and cuts down the sugar content; but they still feel indulgent and damply rich. My trick is to prick the cake with a skewer when it comes out of the oven and pour over a syrup. That adds moisture. Once it's cold I make the icing. Eighty per cent of the food we use is organic," McBride says. 'I've been in a lot of kitchens that seem to do wonderful things and yet the ingredients are not wonderful things, so there was a sense of falseness, and I like to make something more real. He makes the bread using a naturally fermented starter - 'I don't use yeast any more, it's not good for you" - even though the rye and spelt loaves he sends out take all day to make. Awen absolutely refuses to take short cuts," Harris says. Sometimes I weep seeing him there preparing the baked beans for breakfast from scratch when he could just open a tin. But he won't do it. It's not how he cooks. It is time for lunch: cumin and courgette soup followed by summer vegetable ratatouille served with crushed new potatoes in pesto. 'We use mainly homemade stock made from celery, carrot, onion, courgettes and some pea pods if we've got them," McBride says. The ratatouille is inspired by his mother's. 'It's a classic south of France dish [his mother is French] - aubergine, carrots, which I normally wouldn't put in but they are very fresh and tender, onions, tomatoes, red wine, olive oil and garlic, with some spices like cumin and a bit of cayenne pepper. The pesto is made from hazelnuts rather than pine nuts: 'organic pine nuts are too expensive and also there is a lot of flavour in hazelnuts and it's a local nut. They have 30 covers in the cafe, and a strong distrust of mass catering. Harris says he wants it to feel less like a restaurant, more like friends at the back preparing lunch. The cafe is certainly busy enough to be open more, but commercial success isn't the goal. It is more quality of life," McBride says. 'I saw my parents work so much and then my dad lose his job when he was 50, and I thought, I don't want to have the same kind of life. Opening hours are 10am-5pm Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays until mid-October, plus occasional evenings, dates to be announced (potagergarden.org)