Lark Hill Winery's garden grandfather Raymond Hammond dies aged 100

The first thing that you learnt about Lark Hill Winery in Bungendore was that it's run on biodynamic principles. And the second thing you learnt was that the restaurant's veggies came from an abundant garden run by owner Sue Carpenter's 99-year-old dad Ray.

But sadly, no longer. The energetic Ray Hammond turned 100 years old earlier this month, and died one day after his birthday. Grandson and winemaker Chris Carpenter paid tribute to a man who was born at the end of the First World War and who lived into the Facebook era. "He lived such an incredibly interesting life over 10 full decades," he says. "He saw world war, and saw all sorts of changes, airplanes, cars - even in his last few years at home he had a computer and was able to bash out the occasional email."

Carpenter says his grandfather grew up in Eden, at a time when it was still a whaling station, and started his career as a runner for a survey gang in the 1930s and rose to become acting chief of the NSW Forestry Commission. But when he and wife Jean retired to a small farm near Bungendore, they took up a self sufficient lifestyle - growing and raising all their own food.

"They raised lambs, he had quite an incredible vegetable garden with lots of fruit trees and he had bees as well and was a fairly accomplished apiarist. There was always honey at their table and as always there was a lot of contra where sheep was shorn in exchange for honey," Carpenter says. He spent a lot of his childhood helping out on the farm, learning to collect firewood, round up the sheep, pick vegetables. "It was a pretty idyllic way to grow up."

Jean Hammond died at 86 in 2003 and Ray, then aged 87, decided to stay on the farm and keep working, with Sue Carpenter caring for him. He never stopped learning more about producing food and had a meticulous growing plan with staggered plantings to ensure the harvest continued all through the season. "He'd turn up to see us and say, there's just a few beans at the back of the car and I'd go out to help him and there would be three or four 20L containers that he'd picked by himself," Chris Carpenter says. "The only things he needed from the shop were yogurt, milk and biscuits - he was a big fan of morning tea."

That bounty found its way into the Lark Hill cellar door restaurant. Ask Carpenter what he cooked with and he has to take a deep breath - "potatoes and pumpkins, leafy green vegetables, carrots, spinach, corn, mint, apples, quinces, nectarines, green gages, nettles" and more, all pretty much singlehandedly produced by Ray.

And his grandfather taught him some key lessons about food. "I think that self sufficiency is something that once you start thinking about is very hard to give up and shake. It really gets you into an interesting mindset - you don't think about gathering produce for a long period of time, you think about the next meal. Beans keep better on the vine than in the cool room. The produce you pick [now] is always at its best."

Ray remained sharp and active but had to go into hospital last year aged 99 and lived in aged care thereafter. He died a day after his 100th birthday, on January 21. "I have a feeling that by hook or by crook, he was going to make it to 100," Carpenter says.