Not many of us would be up for inviting strangers into our homes. Even fewer of us would agree to give them dinner. Yet Jo Wood, the estranged wife of the Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, is doing just that. So passionate is she about spreading the word on the benefits of going organic that she has opened a pop-up restaurant in her own dining room, with the whimsical name of Mrs Paisley’s Lashings, to coincide with Wimbledon and the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. But then, as she puts it, “I’ve had so many crazy people running in and out of my house over the years and I didn’t know who the hell they were. At least this has got a bit of control and a good meal.”

As if this invasion of her own privacy isn’t commitment enough, she’s giving a percentage of her gross takings to the Soil Association. This charity leads the Food for Life Partnership, a programme to encourage schools to grow their own veg and serve them up in school lunches. Wood is, as it were, putting her kitchen where her mouth is.

Today that kitchen in southwest London is full of children from the local primary school, pounding herbs under the watchful eye of the chef Arthur Potts Dawson of the Central London restaurant Acorn House. Potts Dawson is the man in charge of Mrs Paisley’s Lashings — a name chosen simply because Jo Wood thought the Victorian sound of it tallied with the age of the house, and because it made her smile.

“It’s extremely important to me to bring up my own children and grandchildren with organic food,” Wood explains, as her newest and sixth grandchild, one-month-old Maggie, is carried past by her daughter, Leah. “It’s my passion. I believe in educating children about their food. That baby is going to grow up organically if I have anything to do with it!”

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The Wimbledon schoolchildren are helping to harvest and prepare their own lunch. Their school has its own vegetable garden and works closely with the Food for Life Partnership. But it seems likely that their garden is rather smaller than the Woods’, a 2½ acre park of which the fruit and vegetable part alone is bigger than the average house garden.

Laid out in immaculate rows are hundreds of different varieties of lettuce, potatoes, peas, beans and onions. There are edible flowers, including cornflowers and nasturtiums, and banks of rosemary, lovage, tarragon and camomile. Tomatoes and horseradish supply bloody marys for the restaurant, a covered area packed with soft fruits is being decimated for puddings and cocktails, and trees of peaches and nectarines are trained along a sunny wall. It’s an organic paradise and looks rather like Mr McGregor’s garden in The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Wood’s commitment to a healthy organic lifestyle came late, after a famously hell-raising youth touring the world with the Stones — she once said that she knew she had to give up drugs when she woke up craving a cigarette laced with heroin. But after falling ill in the early 1990s, having Crohn’s disease wrongly diagnosed and being prescribed steroids, she embraced all things organic and has never looked back.

Initially frustrated by how hard it was to buy organic produce, she decided to grow her own, planting potatoes at the family house in Ireland. She used to bring the harvest back, stashed in a suitcase, and even took a sack of potatoes on tour to cook for the bands’ lunch backstage.

Wood has always done the family cooking herself: hers is clearly a working kitchen, with two pestles and mortars, chunky, workmanlike furniture and a cupboard packed with hundreds of cookery books from the River Café Cook Book, Giorgio Locatelli and Alastair Little to the less mainstream Healing With Wholefoods — Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition. The entire extended family get together here regularly at weekends, over a home-cooked lunch, spilling out to the garden when the weather is good. Today there are only seven children in the party, hand-picked because they are in either the school’s cooking or gardening club (though one says she’s there “because Jo Wood’s famous and her husband — Robbie . . .? Robin . . .? Ronnie! — is famous too and I like the Rolling Stones.”) Either way, the famous Jo, and Potts Dawson, take the children round the garden, digging and picking and tasting, and viewing the two new beehives whose 40,000 inhabitants are going to make 60lbs of honey.

“Pulling food out of the soil and cooking it straight away is something I live for,” Potts Dawson says, “and to be able to show kids how to do it pushes all my buttons. The inspiration for today, and for the menu for Mrs Paisley’s Lashings, comes out of the ground – 90 per cent of the vegetables I use come from the garden, but I might have to top up the quantities of broad beans and peas. I just turn up every day and see what there is. If you come back here in two weeks that vegetable garden will be gone.”

Everything that can be local, sustainable and organic is: Potts Dawson talks dreamily about the vegetables he’s been steaming, roasting and grilling, the herbs he scents them with and the flowers he uses to decorate. There might be an amuse bouche of mint or nettle foam to kick things off, then plates of whatever has been dug up that day, and a drinks list tailored to match the feel of the food, using fruit and herbs from the garden.

Of the 250 meals that he and three chefs will prepare over the ten days, 100 will be for invited guests and friends such Sir Philip Green, Kate Moss and Pat Cash; the rest will be for anyone who can get a reservation and has the minimum £120 a head that it costs, making it as expensive as a London restaurant (“Well I’ve got a fabulous London restaurant chef,” Wood says, defensively.) But why is she doing it? Her own son told her that she was mad.

“What else should I do? Sit at home twiddling my thumbs?” she asks. “I wanted to do something that educated people about organic food so I thought, ‘Well, I live in this big house which needs people, and I’ve got a huge vegetable garden, so why don’t I have a few people over? I’ll be educating them on how you can have a wonderful meal straight out of your garden. It’s far healthier for you and it’s better for the environment’.”

Back in the kitchen, the children are arranging cornflowers on a salad and pounding rosemary and oregano to flavour the chicken. Red and white new potatoes are dressed simply with butter “because that’s all they need, and simplicity is what’s on offer. People expect mayo with a potato salad but you don’t always need it”.

According to one of the children, Daisy Hartington, 11, a normal school lunch might be macaroni cheese, or fishfingers and chips. This, it seems fair to say, is not a normal school lunch. There is onion flower and nasturtium salad, red onion and beetroot salad and lettuce with cornflowers. And it all gets eaten.

“There’s nothing better than picking something, taking it into the kitchen, washing it and eating it,” Wood says, tucking in herself. “I swear I can feel my face tingling with all the vitamins and minerals when I eat it.”

Mrs Paisley’s Lashings is open until July 8 (www.mrspaisleyslashings.com)

www.foodforlife.org.uk

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