Compost Rules!

First rule of blogging:  'Never miss a blog'.  Well I’ve missed a few but here I am back with good intentions and determined to rise from my blankety pit early each morning to write and get things done.  Working in Belmond Le Manoir gardens is hard work and to be honest I’m beat in the evenings.  Arriving home, skin tight, dry with dirt and dust there’s nothing for it but to take a long bath, look back over the day with satisfaction, open up a gardening book and chillax. And so this blog, from now on, will be written in the company of the yawning house cat, after a strong coffee, before I pull on my boots, clip on secateurs and set off for Great Milton for another busy day of heritage gardening.

Looking dishevelled after a busy day building our Heritage Garden
with Walmsley Shaw Garden Builders

A view through the growing screens towards the Hartley Botanic Glasshouse

So what’s been happening since my last post in April?  Where do I start?  Our Garden designer Anne Keenan’s plans are tangible now with only a few finishing touches to be added.  We have planted beautiful ‘worker’ plants; ornamentals carefully selected to provide forage for our important invertebrate friends. Our heritage vegetables are looking splendid, making themselves at home in Belmond Le Manoir’s rich soil and worshiping the intense heat that has been beating down on us for the whole of the month of June.

Our first batch of garden compost is well on it’s way and in a couple of weeks I hope to be lavishing our heritage pumpkins, summer squash and beans with generous shovelfuls. With all this dry weather it’s important to conserve moisture in the soil and so a thick dressing of dark, compost around the base of plants after watering keeps the soil spongy and provides plenty of additional nourishment for hungry roots.

Turning the first batch of heritage compost

Composting is a must for us organic gardeners.  It is a magical process that turns our precious garden and kitchen waste into a sweet crumbly substance that teams with microbial life; a veritable gardener’s alchemy really. Bio-diversity is an important element of the Heritage Garden but it is not just birds and bees that are essential in a healthy eco-system.  We often overlook the fact that a healthy soil should be alive with a web of myriad species too. Making compost allows us to feed our plants, improve the structure of the soil, maintain a healthy pH, keep weeds down and diseases at bay. Growing veg asks a lot of the soil and so it is important to maintain its vitality by replacing what we have taken away and keep it from tiring.  If you have access to enough compostable kitchen and garden waste you shouldn’t need to buy in soil improvers or commercial composts and you certainly won’t need to use any artificial fertilzers. In fact if you think of organic gardening as feeding the soil rather than the plant then you are on your way to a gardening nirvana.

By applying compost, not only do we return those nutrients like potassium and nitrogen locked up in our organic waste back to the soil, making them available for our hungry veg, but we provide the conditions for a complex and balanced ecosystem of micro-flora and fauna to become established below the surface.  Bacteria and fungi colonise the compost heap, breaking down the fibrous strands of cellulose and chitin that gave structure to the parent plant material and they use up the nitrogen contained in the tender and sappy plant parts turning it into more stable nitrates which are more easily absorbed by your plants.  

As these microbes get to work the heap heats up releasing funky smelling gases but as the they continue do their thing and the materials break down and stabilise the aroma will subside.  Sadly for our microbial friends, but happily for us, larger organisms move in and start to feed on their protein rich bodies along with the decomposing plant material, further breaking down and mixing the heap.  Earthworms, beetles, centipedes and springtails are the beasts of the jungle here and their presence is a sure sign that your compost is going to co-operate.

You can make compost pretty quickly if you get the conditions right. It’s like having a successful dinner party. You need good food and the right mix of people to get the conversation going. So invite some brown waste like herbaceous perennial plant stems, cabbage stems, wood shavings as well as some green waste like grass clippings, kitchen peelings and soft vegetable leaves and stems.  You want to layer these alternately in your heap just like you would design your seating plan, keep it moist but not wet; lubricated but not sloshed, and keep it covered it for a while.  It will start to heat up very quickly, especially in summer, and when it does you turn the whole heap to ensure oxygen is getting to the decomposers ensuring that they can get on with their important work; a bit like retiring to the terrace for some fresh air and more stimulating conversation.  Coffee always helps things along and you can apply this in the form of grounds from the cafétiere or espresso machine.

The ultimate building materials for your compost bay

In our Heritage Garden at Belmond Le Manoir we have constructed a row of three compost bays from reclaimed pallet wood.  These are cheap and easy to build and if you take your time you can make them look pretty smart organic gardening doesn’t have to look ugly). They are about three feet square and four tall, actually a little smaller than the optimal size of about 5 feet all around.  We fill two of the bays up as quickly as possible, wait for the material to really heat up to somewhere near 65º C, by which time the volume of the heap will have reduced by about half.  Then turn both heaps into the third bay with a fork.  This can be exerting; one is likely to perspire and take on some of the inevitable composty aromas that escape the heap, so choose a moment when you are feeling at one with nature in order to perform the operation.  This third bay is then turned into its neighbour and then back again several times over the following weeks. Perhaps add a little water or drier material accordingly, making small adjustments, until you end up with a wonderful black, inert compost.  You will know it is ready when it smells pleasantly sweet and the original ‘parent’ materials are no longer recognizable from their original form.

Perfect compost - Dry, rich and crumbly

I recently gave a talk on composting at Garden Organic’s Ryton Gardens to a group of their ‘Master Gardeners’.  These folk are volunteers who learn new gardening skills with Garden Organic and pass them on to others in their local communities up and down the country.  You can find out more about composting and the important work Garden Organic do in promoting organic methods up and down the country at www.gardenorganic.co.uk

Meet the Gardeners of Le Manoir aux Quat Saisons

Over the course of the spring and summer I'll be introducing the gardeners at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons and they'll be talking about the seasonal tasks performed in the vegetable gardens and orchards.

This week meet Amy Cartwright and Kelly Murray who are working in the Kitchen Garden for the next six months.

"We're working with the veg team as part of the Soil Association's Future Growers scheme. Despite only having been here a few weeks we've been involved in many aspects of the garden. 

Soil Association 'Future Growers' Amy Cartwright (left) & Kelly Murray (Right)

While the heritage garden is under construction we've been busy sowing some heritage varieties, a lot of which have really interesting stories and unusual names. Some of our favourites are Mummy Pea (pea), Tall Telephone (pea), Beryl (broad bean) and Orange Banana (tomato). 

We're discovering a lot about the provenance of seeds and vegetables. While planting Rose de Roscoff onion sets we learnt that people from the town of Roscoff (France) used to come across to the UK, often on bicycle, to sell their onions to the British, even roaming as far as Scotland. This is where the stereotype of a beret-wearing Frenchman with garlic and onions hanging around his neck originates!

French 'Onion Johnnies'
Copyright: untappedcities.com

One of the best things about working in the garden of Le Manoir is growing a range of unique and unusual produce for the kitchen that the chefs might otherwise struggle to source. At the moment we've been supplying the kitchen with forced seakale. It's incredible to see and taste the difference that excluding the light makes to this vegetable.

Sea Kale harvested from Belmond Le Manoir Kitchen Garden
Copyright 2014 Anna Greenland

Spring and summer are the busiest and most abundant seasons for any productive garden, and with so many great projects on the go it's an exciting time to be a part of the team."

The Edible Garden Show and a Royal Visit

For at least 8000 years humans have been cultivating a thin and delicate layer of the earth’s surface; soil, built up over billions of years from long decayed organisms and eroded rock. 

The Fertile Cresent - The origins of Agriculture 8000 years ago.
Copyright: Browse the World Mr Dowling
http://www.mrdowling.com/603mesopotamia.html

Intervening in nature by saving seed from the first wild species of edible plants and selecting from their progeny for the most useful characteristics, we have grown and developed a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables that provide us with all the nourishment we could ever need.  You would think by now that we’d have mastered it but, it seems, not quite. Over the last few centuries the industrialisation of agriculture seemed to offer a final solution to providing abundant supplies of food for everyone and nowadays we are accustomed to finding it conveniently processed and ready to eat on supermarket shelves. 

A modern ready meal
Copyright: PorkFork6
http://www.flickr.com/photos/porkfork/2251023090/

Where once we had an intimate connection with our soil, saved the best seeds from this year’s crop to sow in the next and worked within the bounds of our natural environment to grow what the season, soil and climate granted us, now we know little about where and how our food originates, yet expect it to be ever available and inexpensive to boot.

However it seems unlikely that our 8000 years experience of farming could be scrubbed from our DNA overnight like soil from a muddy old spade. The Edible Garden Show at Alexandra Palace was thronging with gardeners for whom growing their own food is something deeply ingrained and connects them to the earth, nature and their communities. There are allotmenteers, school children, garden designers, permaculturists, seed merchants, poultry and bee keepers, celebrity chefs, botanists, first time GIYers, urban farmers, journalists and a royal or two, all connected by their love of growing “good, clean and safe food”.  Yes it’s a trade show, stuff is for sale, celebs sign books and so on, but there is a real sense that people want to reconnect with nature and reclaim some control over their environment and the food they eat.

Of course Belmond Le Manoir are in on the show, joining with our partners Garden Organic to raise awareness of the amazing Heritage Seed Collection and our fabulous new Heritage Garden at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.  

Plan of the Heritage Garden at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons

Raymond Blanc has no sooner arrived than he is enthralling a group of London school children with tales of ‘Henri le Worm’ and his subterranean adventures. He tells them that they must save the planet since he is getting on a bit and has a hotel to run!  He is so involved with his new superhero friends that he fails to notice that Their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have stopped by to say hello. I give him a gentle nudge just in case he misses the opportunity to tell them about our Heritage Garden and he reluctantly excuses himself.

Raymond Blanc OBE enthuses about soil with London School Children

Prince Charles is the Patron of Garden Organic and RB is the Vice President of the charity.  Both are powerful and passionate advocates for sustainable, organic practices and for conservation.  They both have wonderful gardens, Highgrove and Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons respectively, which are beacons for organic growers at home and abroad. The Prince and Duchess are relaxed and jovial and so not too alarmed when RB produces a bright yellow ‘Delicata’ squash, a heritage variety from the Belmond Le Manoir kitchen garden, and suggests they have it in ravioli for supper.  If it was their kebab night they didn’t let on and accepted it whole heartedly.

Raymond Blanc OBE enthuses about 'Delicata' squash to HRH The Duchess of Cornwall.
HRH The Prince of Wales and Garden Organic CEO James Campbell can be seen in the background

Talking of kebabs, have you ever noticed young tomato plants growing from cracks in the pavement close to kebab shops?  If not keep an eye out this summer. The EGS guest speaker, botanist James Wong, has spotted them and he says they grow from seeds that germinate after falling to the ground in the salad of greasy, late night doners. Isn’t it funny how nature insinuates its way into the urban environment? More and more, especially in our larger cities, people are inviting plants in, making room for urban allotments, edible schoolyards, guerrilla gardens and green roofs. Garden Organic recently ran an exciting project called 'Sowing New Seeds', designed to find new varieties of exotic and interesting vegetables introduced to UK allotments and community gardens by recent immigrants. We will be welcoming one of these new arrivals, an Amaranth called ‘Tower Hamlets’, into our Heritage Garden this year.  It is a relative of beetroot and spinach and is grown for its edible seeds and leaves.  The seeds are especially interesting since they are gluten free and high in protein, making them a tasty substitute for couscous and a nutritious addition to salads, soups, curries and stews.  In Latin America they are toasted and combined with honey or chocolate to make a sweet snack. Yum.

RB's vividly coloured squash made for some great press photos in the hands of the amused Duchess of Cornwall but it also represented that connection between all gardeners, the calling to love, grow and conserve the fantastical bounty that nature gifts to all of us.  Furthermore it symbolises that complex simplicity involved in producing food: the unfathomable wonder of nature’s scheme and the simple process of cause and effect that is planting a seed, nurturing it and reaping the rewards.

The Green Man of Spring

The Green Man of Spring. 
Copyright Alex Francis Illustrations
http://www.alexifrancisillustrations.co.uk

The bones of winter have been picked bare and the Green Man of Spring is stirring in the gardens of Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. 

Seeds of heritage cabbage, celeriac, onion, pepper and tomato have sprouted and are quite comfy for now in the Heritage Garden’s glasshouse. The gardeners are drinking from springs of sunshine and no longer require their long-johns!  Long furrows, straight as arrows, are being drawn across the crumbly soil of the vegetable beds.  The lids of the terracotta forcer pots are being worn quite jauntily as the blanched rhubarb leaves begin to push them aside.  Someone tell a pastry chef!

And so a new chapter in Belmond Le Manoir’s garden story has begun.  Designer Anne Keenan MSGD and garden builders Walmsley Shaw are now on site. We begin 'setting out' from Anne’s detailed plans by marking out the new paths and the principle structures.

Setting out the new Heritage Garden

Anne’s winning Heritage Garden design echoes the formal features found throughout the Belmond Le Manoir gardens, those wiggly paths, circles in the form of the dovecote, stone roundels and clipped bay, as well as the geometric formality of Jekka McVicar's wonderful herb garden.  

Raymond Blanc is a lover of the sinuous line. He wants the garden to share that same sensuous and feminine quality that he has nurtured throughout Belmond Le Manoir over thirty years and, along with Anne, he has selected the most beautiful and sustainable materials available. We really hope to show through this project that an organic garden can look stunning as well as being ethical!

Raymond Blanc OBE & Designer Anne Keenan MSGD

Anne's clever design will slow one's passage through the Heritage Garden, encouraging our guests to rest, pause and take in the shifting views across the gardens and to delight in the details of the fascinating heritage vegetable varieties on show.  If you visit you will really get amongst the plants, which have been carefully chosen to attract bees and butterflies, the true workers of nature!   The garden will vibrate with movement, form and colour.  Scent from the flowers will weave harmoniously through the music of wildlife going about its important business. 

Anyway.  Before I get too carried away it's back to work!  

Just so you know, building gardens isn't a walk in the park.  I have a bruise that resembles a Turner landscape to prove it.  Fortunately the Walmsley Shaw team are true pros and the French foreman is showing me the ropes as well as teaching me the gallic names for garden tools. I hope RB is impressed!

Above: Recycled Holm oak Beam. 
Below: Uprooted birch hedge to be recycled.

Now that we have set out we remove an old birch hedge and retain the papery trunks. We keep these aside to provide a habitat for a variety of insects that help maintain a balanced ecosystem and reduce the likelihood of a pest outbreak. Recycling and sustainability are big themes in the garden and so we retain extant Cotswold stone edging for constructing seating walls and we reuse the base of the old paths as a foundation for the new ones. Broken terracotta pots have been collected and stored over winter and will soon be crushed to form the surface of another new path.  We are proud not to be using any concrete on this build, which consumes huge amounts of energy in its production. 

Fortuitously, an ancient Holm oak on the Old Drive came down in high winds this winter and so we have salvaged one of its enormous beams. It has been sunk upright into a deeply excavated hole and backfilled with waste rubble and topsoil.  Soon to become a hand sculpted, five star bug hotel it will boast hundreds of rooms, all made from hollow stems of nettle, pampas grass and teasel, and will cater exclusively for our special invertebrate friends, who we were just talking about.  With wonderful reptilian bark made greenish by lichen and its strong, hard wood, the Holm oak was a symbol of fertility for the ancient Greeks. Can’t imagine why! This windfall has also provided us with a bounty of hardwood bark chippings perfect for use on our wiggly  paths and demonstration garden.

The delivery of several Scottish whiskey barrels predictably distracts the garden team from their springtime duties.  Like bees foraging for nectar I find them practically upturned in the barrels, inhaling the peaty fumes left behind by gallons of uisce beatha and emerging with wistful demeanours. 

A fragrant Scotch whisky cask & water-butt

One particularly large barrel will collect run-off rainwater from the roof of the Hartley Botanic glasshouse.  Two other half casks will be sunk into the garden, filled with water drawn from the depths of our bore hole, and planted up to create a habitat for insects and amphibians.  We had to think on our feet when the barrels, clearly intended for sale as planters, and not wildlife ponds, arrived with several holes drilled in their bottoms.  RB, once notified, came to the rescue with a pocket full of champagne corks, which we pushed snugly into the offending holes. In celebration he jumped into the pit intended for the barrel providing us with ample opportunity for photos and a caption competition! Please do Tweet your suggestions @raymond_blanc.

RB hits rock bottom!

This weekend (28th-30th March) Raymond Blanc and Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons will be joining our partner Garden Organic at 'The Edible Garden Show' in Alexandra Palace, London.  Please do come and visit us. We will be getting enthused about the Heritage Garden and the Heritage Seed Library's collection of rare and unusual varieties. 

Hope to see you there...

RB & Me

Push Ya'Self!

Raymond Blanc has self-deprecatingly diagnosed himself as a ‘micro-idiot’.  Far from seeking professional help he has been spreading it about without regard as to the consequences for our Great British tradition of underwhelming cuisine and hospitality.  Now we have a situation in the UK where chefs are running around obsessing over finding the best local, seasonal and sustainable ingredients for their kitchens and aspiring to produce the finest cuisine on the planet.  How on earth did we end up here?

The story of RB’s exile from France to England - he ventured to suggest a sauce would benefit from less seasoning and was brained with a sauté pan by an incandescent chef who warned him never to return - and his indisputable influence on our food culture, has by now entered the canon of British culinary heritage.  His classic French values of ‘terroir’ and regard for service, coupled with his verve, creativity and a devilish eye for the details, are what keeps LMQS fresh, relevant and very, very busy.  In this 30^th anniversary year, Le Manoir remains the place in Britain for aspiring super-chefs to receive their training and launch incredible careers.

I guess this is why RB sent me to spend a week in his famous kitchen, giving me the opportunity to see how the lovely vegetables we are growing this year in our new Heritage Garden will finish up exalted on some very happy diner’s plate.  Of course the high standards so evident in the gardens are only amplified in the kitchen. It has the feel of a gastronomic super-collider, fizzing with intense energy and emitting knockout aromas like solar flares.

Let loose on Le Manoir pass

Nonetheless I am impressed by the busy hush of the place.  With RB’s progeny numbering Marco Pierre White and John Burton Race, I had been bracing myself for a culinary Armageddon, my imagination overfed on George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’.  Happily, conditions have improved a lot since Orwell's day and later it is hard to believe the brigade are in full service because it is so quiet at the pass. The chefs are in continuous, elegant communication with each other, confirming timings, shuttling for ingredients, considering seasonings and murmuring over recipes. They were working cleanly and methodically, something for me to remember back in the garden! 

Executive Head Chef Gary Jones tells me that during their two and a half years apprenticeships the young chefs never get too comfortable before being posted to a new station.  Just the right amount of pressure is applied to keep them focused, involved and perpetually learning. 

A plaque hung above the kitchen threshold reads:

‘This is Le Manoir

Push Ya’self’

Benoit Blin, Raymond Blanc OBE, Gary Jones

RB and Gary Jones have designed a modern kitchen that accommodates around thirty chefs and a cookery school. It is a large and labyrinthine space and every surface is in constant use. Of course it is well equipped (although tasting spoons seem to dematerialize like odd socks) but this is no grand scale chemistry set. The focus here is on the integrity of the produce.

A vacuum machine, as seen on Masterchef, in which meat and veg are bagged and hermetically sealed in preparation for a gentle sous-vide bath, is perhaps the only piece of unfamiliar kitchen equipment in use. It allows fibres and proteins to relax, then fall apart and for aromatics to impart their sublime flavours.

Duck, vacuum packed with aromatics

I guess I’m a decent home cook - I can boil and scramble an egg - and so I could handle the prepping of veg, meat and seafood under the dubious watch of various Chefs de Partie. However when I was sent to help out with constructing delicate appetisers during evening service my gardener’s hands were infuriatingly locked into turnip pulling mode. Both the delicate micro-green garnishes and my ego suffered some bruising.  

Pastry was altogether another world. So much so that I am still unconvinced it even really exists! Neither can I begin to fathom what sorcery is at work that conjures such perfect and ephemeral wonders as those desserts created by Head Pastry Chef Benoit Blin and his team. 
  

Sadly I must leave that pleasure to our guests.  I’m off to visit our friends at Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library.  I'll report back next week…

Last autumn I was awarded the opportunity to join Raymond Blanc OBE, his friends at Garden Organic and the Society of Garden Designers in creating a wonderful new ‘Heritage Garden’ at Monsieur Blanc’s renowned Oxford hotel Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons. As ‘National Heritage Garden Scholar’ I will have a unique and remarkable opportunity to become part of Le Manoir’s garden team, building, planting and tending to an incredible garden of heritage and heirloom vegetable varieties all centred around a stunning Hartley Botanic glass house and designed by landscape architect Anne Keenan MSGD. Follow the story here...

Heritage Style!

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...