The kitchen garden is a working garden where we grow herbs, salads and fruit for the café. We hope to demonstrate how you can use your own garden to produce fabulous food. Whether it’s just a window box of herbs or a full blown allotment, there’s always plenty to see and learn.
We have one part-time gardener, who creates a fantastic display of veg, showing just how much can be acheived in a little time. Of course, not everything performs well, and this last season we struggled with runner beans (perhaps the summer was just too cold), but we did well with leeks and parsnips. I picked some at the beginning of January 2012 and the cafe made delicious soup.
This coming season we hope to plant lots of different varieties of carrot, to see which performs best for us, and of course many more leeks as we use so many in our soup and in our wonderful Homity Pie.
We also grow masses of apples and pears on the trained fruit trees within the garden – many of which are the original plants from the garden’s Victorian heyday. Alexis in the cafe makes delicious cakes from this fresh fruit, and last autumn started producing our own special Woodside chutney. Even more surprising are the old peach trees which crop heavily on a south-facing wall. They’ve come through the last two cold winters very well, and we’ve recently started re-training them properly against the wall after some years of neglect.
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