The Kitchen Garden
We are so excited to introduce you to our new project.
Well sourced, high quality, fresh, sustainable produce is at the heart of everything that we do, so we jumped at the chance to start to produce as many of our own ingredients as we can on our family’s 15-acre smallholding. The ingredients that we produce will be able to be harvested by us, by hand, every day - you can’t get fresher than that!
We will be employing a ‘no dig’ method as much as we can meaning that we won’t be digging the beds. This improves the soil health, reduces weeds and doesn’t disrupt the micro-organisms & worms that help feed the plants. We also don’t use any chemicals on our crops but instead will be opting for physical or biological controls for pests. We are also aiming to produce as much of our own homegrown compost as possible with any food waste from the restaurant that we can’t funnel back in going to a local company who use it to produce a liquid crop fertiliser.
After this year’s trials & experiments we are aiming to produce all of our own micro herbs, baby vegetables & edible flowers.
We will also be growing our own heritage beetroots, carrots, celeriac, fennel, crones, garlic, onions, banana shallots, tomatoes, broad beans, garden peas, asparagus, potatoes, sweetcorn, cabbage, kohlrabi, hard herbs, elderflowers, elderberries, blackberries, sloes, strawberries, wild strawberries, raspberries, apples, rhubarb and damsons.
Kitchen Garden Diary
Updates from our Kitchen Garden.
Working on a Sunday
If you haven’t seen our Instagram stories; the polytunnel frame is all up, the raised beds are in and filled, the elephant garlic has been planted & some of Dad’s rhubarb has been transferred over. Next job is to get the door frames finished & then we can get the cover on!
We have been so impressed with First Tunnels, not only are they super helpful but the quality of the frame is great & we just can’t wait to see it finished now! The raised beds have all been made from reclaimed wooden shelves from a warehouse too.
We’re still harvesting our beetroots, parsnips, fennel, celeriac & weirdly the odd tomato, raspberry or strawberry!
Garden madness
Gosh this month has been busy… but we do love it when plans start coming together.
Our autumn harvests are in full swing Apples, fennel, the last of the tomatoes & still more beetroots. We have a couple of very exciting weeks planned up at the Kitchen Garden. Our planning permission has been approved so the polytunnel can finally be erected, we have a new gardener joining our team - I’ll introduce you to Charlie later & our garden office has arrived too. I can’t wait to show you around.
It all begins with an idea..
When the restaurant was forced to close back in March, 2020 Jon & I spent quite a bit of our time looking after our niece & nephew. We wanted a fun project that would keep the four of us busy & preferably out in the fresh air. As fortune would have it my brother has a small holding & a rather big, green double decker bus which we thought would make the perfect GREENhouse!
So with plentiful outside space, our trusty little sidekicks and a YouTube video on how to grow your own vegetables the story begins…
Other Sustainable Initiatives
Zero Food Waste - Jon has always prided himself in using the whole ingredient, after all if our suppliers have gone to all the effort to produce an amazing product then we should use as much as we possibly can. Any waste we do produce then goes to a local company who use aerobic digestion to produce high quality fertiliser which is then used by the farmers who's produce we use again!
Bottled Water - From Day One at the restaurant we have worked with EcoPure Waters. Our EcoPure system allows us to filter and bottle both Still and Sparkling water on site at the restaurant using reuseable glass bottles.
Work Life Balance - Everyone knows that the restaurant industry is a hard one. We were one of the first restaurants in the country to change our opening hours to a 4 day week so that our staff can have a life outside of the restaurant & ensures that they don't burn out.
Sustainable Sourcing - Fresh, local, seasonal almost goes without saying but we have always worked with some of the best suppliers in the industry to ensure that all of our produce is as sustainable as possible. Lumiere was one of the first restaurants to have an Ecopure Water system installed to create our own bottled water. We also tailor our closedown periods around the opening times of the fish markets, with fish and shellfish being one of the most delicate and expensive ingredients this is essential to bring our customers the best and freshest sustainably sourced seafood possible, we never use frozen or unsustainable seafood.
Kitchen Redevelopment - 11 years ago we changed to all induction in the kitchen with energy saving refrigeration, lower extraction usage & LED lighting. Obviously saving on energy costs is fantastic but it has significantly improve the working environment in the kitchen too.
