In the height of summer, The Small Holding would normally be buzzing. The outdoor patio would be thronged with diners chatting and enjoying their meals. Chefs and servers would flit from table to table, delivering plates and pouring drinks.

But with coronavirus lockdown in full effect, the only movement here is further down the garden; The Small Holding is so named because of the acre or so of land that sits mere metres from the dining area—a literal smallholding in the village of Kilndown, Kent—where chef Will Devlin grows most of what he serves in the restaurant. While the restaurant sleeps, a swarm of busy gardeners are working as hard as ever to keep the farm ticking over. Most of them are bees, but Will is also among them.

“We’ve been busier than ever, to be honest,” he says. “The thing is, when we closed at the end of March, that’s the start of the busiest time of the year on the farm. April and May is when we’re sowing seeds and getting everything in the ground, and then we’re harvesting and weeding all the way through the summer.”

With the last of the pumpkins and squashes now happily stowed in the ground, Will and team are busy digging up lettuces, bunches of carrots and big, fat bulbs of fennel, ready to send out to locals in veg boxes. Emboldened by the summer sun, peppers, aubergines and tomatoes have taken over the two long polytunnels that stretch down the length of the garden. A wildflower meadow just next door is alive with bees, who chivvy to and from a pair of beehives, and beyond that, there are pigs, ducks and chickens, most of whom are taking shelter from the midday sun.

It’s idyllic—as good a place as any to spend your lockdown—but when Will and his brother Matt discovered the site some two and a half years ago it was unrecognisable from the picture of tranquillity it is today. It had once been a pub, but the doors had been shut for some time and it was in need of some serious work.

“It was minging!” Will laughs. “Everything was rotten, but I just thought it was perfect—we could have the farm, a car park, a little restaurant and an open kitchen. Plus, it was cheap as chips. The bloke didn’t want a lot of money for it, but we didn’t really have any money at all! We blagged it a bit cheaper and then when we got the keys, all of our friends pitched in to help paint and decorate it. It was a real team effort.”

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Two and a half years later, the effort has proven to be well worth it. Stellar reviews in The Guardian and The Telegraph made 2019 a breakout year for The Small Holding, and the Good Food Guide promptly named Will as their Chef to Watch in 2020. There’s no questioning Will’s credentials as a chef, (having previously worked at the likes of Thackeray’s in Tunbridge Wells, The Windmill in Hollingbourne, and Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus) but produce is what makes The Small Holding truly special; when something arrives on your plate here, it has only been out of the ground for a matter of hours.

“The great thing about Will and what he's doing at The Small Holding is that he takes the farm-to-table thing seriously,” says Tom Shingler, editor at Great British Chefs. “Rather than a raised bed with a few herbs in it and passing that off as a kitchen garden, he's gone the whole hog, quite literally! Using local produce is of course fantastic, but when the ingredients on the plate have come from a farm dedicated to supplying a single restaurant, they're grown for flavour above all else.”

Will grows about 200 different species of fruit and veg throughout the year. In winter, squashes, potatoes, and brassicas come to the fore, then the first harbingers of spring–wild garlic, then asparagus—lift their heads above ground before a bounty of summer fruit and veg sweeps in. This is only the third summer that The Small Holding has had a crop to speak of and already, the farm is delivering in spades. Will is particularly enthused about his summer berries.

“We've got about six different varieties of strawberries on the go, then there are blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants, red gooseberries, green gooseberries.” He pauses for breath. “This is the first year for our loganberries and tayberries. There are boysenberries.” He’s forgetting something, he says. “Tummelberries! They're like a really long blackberry, crossed with a mulberry! They're a really old English variety.”

““I think we’ve all been on this heritage bandwagon, but honestly, they just don’t grow very well.” ”

— Will Devlin

With Kent being the ‘Garden of England’, there’s certainly an emphasis on older, English crops at The Small Holding. Will feels a responsibility to keep lesser-known varieties alive, but he won’t do that at the expense of flavour; everything grown here is grown to be eaten and enjoyed and for that reason, Will has steered away from heritage fruit and vegetables, instead choosing to focus on varieties that taste the best.

“I think we’ve all been on this heritage bandwagon, but honestly, they just don’t grow very well,” he says. “They’re not as productive and they’re more susceptible to disease. Even if you manage to get a good crop, they don’t necessarily taste any better than other varieties.”

Though he understands the importance of preserving heritage varieties in seed banks, Will would much rather be growing fruit and veg that really delivers on the plate. As an example, he points to one of his strawberry varieties—the Malling Centenary.

“A proper national hero!” he exclaims. “It was designed in the 1900s in West Malling, which is just up the road from us. Over time it has been bred and tweaked, and now it’s known as one of the most consistent, delicious strawberries in the world. That’s what I want to give our customers, not a heritage strawberry grown for the sake of it. It’s like saying, I don't want to use a washing machine, I want to wash everything by hand. That’s fine, but your clothes might not be that clean and it’s going to take ages! Is it really worth the effort?”

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On the other side of the Atlantic, American chef Dan Barber has taken a similar approach to produce. Dan shot to prominence in the first season of Netflix’s Chef’s Table as the head chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York—a restaurant that proudly serves raw fruit and vegetables from accompanying Blue Hill Farm as part of a $278 (£216) tasting menu. Frustrated that fruits and vegetables were being bred for productivity over flavour, Dan set out to turn the tables at Blue Hill Farms and has since started Row 7 Seeds—a company which aims to make his tasty new varieties available to people all over the world.

Will is an early adopter of Dan’s vegetables—one of the first in the UK. “We've got their snow peas, the Koginut squash and the flame beetroot,” he says. “The snow peas are already flowering now—they look great. I don’t think anyone else in the world is doing what Row 7 is doing, so it’s great to be growing them here.”

The fruit and vegetables, though obvious, are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to produce at The Small Holding. All the meat served in the restaurant comes from Will’s own animals, whether that is his Berkshire pigs in the paddock, ducks, chickens, cows or lambs in nearby fields. The bees, aforementioned, collect nectar from the wildflower meadow to produce incredible honey, which Will uses with care in the kitchen.

The recent purchase of a copper still has allowed them to start distilling their own spirits, using herbs and spices that grow on the farm. Then there’s the small, inconspicuous shed by the pigpen—home to dozens of mushroom farms, which hang like stalactites from the ceiling.

“We grow them in plastic logs,” he explains. “You pack them with pressed wood chip, inoculate them with the spores and keep them in a nice humid environment.” In ideal conditions, Will reckons the current set up gives them about 4 kilograms of mushrooms a week. He has plans to set up a proper controlled environment, with a shipping container, humidifiers, temperature control and fans, but it’s the sort of investment that doesn’t take priority right now. “It’d be about 3-4 grand to get it set up—you have to grow a lot of mushrooms to break even on that!” he laughs. “Either that or we’re growing the wrong type of mushrooms.”

Will buys a few things in from local suppliers and he orders his fish and seafood from all over the UK, but aside from that, The Small Holding runs entirely self-sustaining. It’s quite a feat, though it must be noted, not a cheap one—the farm requires full-time gardeners and produces a significant water bill, not to mention the startup costs. “People often think it must be cheaper than buying all your own produce, but it’s definitely not,” says Will. “If you’re in it for the long game you’ll start seeing the benefits, but we always wanted to do this for quality, not because it’d be cheaper.”

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With no hungry diners to feed during the lockdown, Will has been funnelling all his produce into The Small Holding’s online shop, which sells fruit and veg boxes for locals, as well as eggs, charcuterie, honey, butter and a wide variety of pantry supplies. The uptake has been phenomenal and the building has had to evolve once again, from pub, to restaurant, to logistics warehouse. Not only does The Small Holding sell all their own produce, but Will also buys wine, cheese, beer, spirits and meat from his suppliers, then sells it through his own shop.

““We always wanted to do this for quality, not because it’d be cheaper.””

— Will Devlin

“We realised pretty quickly that we could use our platform to help support other producers around us,” he says. “With restaurants being closed they had lost their route to market too, so if we can buy a few cases of gin off Greensand Ridge and some beers from Cellar Head [Brewing Company], then sell them through our shop, it’s good for all of us. It’s our responsibility, I think—if we want to see them through the other side we have to keep supporting them.”

In the wake of coronavirus, hundreds of restaurants around the country have started similar schemes, and if there’s a silver lining to be teased out of the fallout, it is a desire on the part of consumers to keep restaurants and producers afloat. A Food Foundation report published at the end of April found that demand for veg boxes has doubled during the coronavirus crises, with sales increasing by 111%. Some of that increase belongs to the big players but it’s not just the likes of Abel & Cole, Daylesford Organic and Riverford that are benefitting–smaller box schemes (those that deliver less than 300 boxes a week) have reported an even larger sales increase of 134%.

For businesses like Will’s, those numbers are a lifeline—a glimmer of light that offers a possible way out of the darkness. If restaurants are going to lose a percentage of their usual revenue to social distancing, can online shops help to make up the gap? Will says yes, but the challenge going forward will be managing to run two sides of the business with the same limited resources.

“Once the restaurant reopens, we don’t want to abandon the customers who want to keep ordering from the shop,” he says. “But we’re already using the whole restaurant space just to pack and ship all the orders! I think the way forward is to work out a way of doing both.”