Kitchen Garden Open Day

Our veg beds grow all sorts of fresh leafy greens and delicious veggies. We grow lettuce, cabbage varieties, sweetcorn, chard and asparagus - just to name a few. You’ll notice some of our patches are covered with protective nets to deter the resident pheasants, rabbits and birds, who like our produce just as much as we do.

Our two poly tunnels are temperature-controlled tunnels to protect our produce from the elements and provide a peak environment for growth year round. Here is where we grow our numerous varieties of heritage tomatoes, as well as a colourful and flavourful array of peppers, chillies, melons, salad leaves and edible flowers.

In our fruit cage you’ll find all that is sweet, seasonal and fresh, including numerous varieties of strawberries, raspberries, cherries, rhubarb, currants - and much more besides. The produce here changes year by year, season by season. The outer cage protects the produce from the local wildlife who seem to take a liking to it, so please remember to shut the door behind you as you explore.

This is a quiet, scenic part of our Kitchen Garden with views out over the estuary. It’s a lovely space to wander in near complete silent - excepting the grasshoppers humming away - with blossoming trees in the spring, swaying grasses in summer & ripe fruit trees in autumn. It grows varieties of apples and pears, while the surrounding hedgerows are foraged for other seasonal produce like sea buckthorn and rosehips.

Our herb garden grows numerous different varieties of herbs to flavour our dishes. Just some of them include wild garlic, dill, parsley, sorrel - and even chocolate mint! These are picked daily to be used in our dishes. Dotted around the garden you’ll also see the edible flowers used to garnish our desserts and our cocktails, which pollinators just love.

A small but integral part of our Kitchen Garden, our greenhouse provides a home for our newly planted seedlings before they’re planted out in the vegetable patches or the poly tunnel. We only plant from seeds and cuttings, so we know exactly where our produce has come from, and our gardeners spend a fair amount of their time here tending them throughout their growth.

We promote biodiversity in our garden by planting annual blooms, as well as ‘companion planting’. By planting particular plants and flowers next to our produce we encourage pollinators, including wisteria, chive, lavender and borage flowers, to stave away pests and limit the use of pesticides to near zero.

We grow plants alongside each other that support and help each other thrive, perhaps by offering shade, or by putting certain necessary nutrients into the soil. Peas and beans for instance, add nitrogen to the soil. 
 
The ‘three sisters’ method involves the growing together of beans, squashes and corn. Beans fix nitrogen into the ground, squashes have a wide leaf that provides cover and shade, to protect against weeds and moisture loss from the soil, while corn offers support to the growing beans. 

Our gardening team and chefs work together in to plan, cultivate and create dishes for our restaurant. Homegrown produce champions seasonal, heirloom varieties not easily found in the shops. Head Gardener Jane Rudd and her team tend to and crop the produce daily, then take it to the capable hands of our chefs. From here our kitchen team use as much as the produce as possible, taking parts that may otherwise be thrown away, such as fruit rinds and stones, to create jams and fruit vinegars.