I love eating good food and growing tasty
fresh veg for the plate. That’s
why a few years ago I enrolled on a horticulture course. Ever since I’ve been learning
more and more about growing organically and how to produce food more
sustainably. Back home in County Antrim I worked with a
mental health charity to build a community vegetable garden and got involved with a great Belfast business, popping up at events
with our organic coffee shop, field kitchen and ‘Edible Education’ workshops. Now I’m
working in a kitchen garden that supplies wonderful fruit and vegetables for
Raymond Blanc OBE’s world famous, two Michelin starred Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons hotel and restaurant. No pressure at all!
Le Manoir’s kitchen garden is a real beacon
for organic gardeners across the world and of course for people who just love
gardens. With its formal layout
you’d think it might be pretty traditional, stuffed full of choice English and
French vegetable varieties; but take a look around and you’ll soon see its
plants are as bold and cosmopolitan as London fashion week. You’ll find lemongrass and cardamom,
amaranth, Chilean guava, bananas, mangoes, 'Shark’s Fin' melon; all cohabiting
harmoniously with RB’s favourite ‘Demi Long de Croissy’ turnips and
good old Savoy cabbages. Naturally
our heritage garden will be joining in the party. This season think vegetables in rainbow stripes, dip-dyes,
day-glo, ruffles and challenging headgear.
Over the coming season I’ll be reporting
every week on the progress of our Heritage Garden, profiling some of the
extraordinary varieties we’ve got growing and I’ll be visiting our friends at Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library where they are pulling out all the stops to
ensure that heritage doesn’t become history. You’ll get to meet some of Le Manoir’s gardeners (who don’t
hold back when it comes to sharing their garden secrets) and of course RB is bound to make an appearance!
In my next post I’ll be writing about the
week when I left my wellies in the tool shed, threw on some crisp chef’s
whites, joined Le Manoir’s legendary kitchen brigade and got to see how our veg
makes the (very short) journey from the garden, across the wiggly Le Manoir
path, into the kitchen, then gloriously onto the plates of some very happy guests.
In the meantime there are seeds to be sown...
