(serene music)
- My name is Diane Butcher
and this is Jo Pattinson, my colleague,
and we both work here at Askham Hall Gardens, in Cumbria
in the north of England.
We have two glasshouses, two polytunnels
and quite a lot of raised beds.
And then beyond that, we have a fruit cage,
we have a pond with an orchard, and then a hotbed system,
which takes up another part of the garden.
And then going a little further afield,
we have a new project garden called the hillside garden
which we started last year,
and that is almost allotment style, a lot of beds up there.
And the produce from the gardens goes in several directions.
First of all, it goes to Allium
our restaurant here at Askham Hall,
and then it goes to our other sister hotels.
- So, three different types of restaurants,
there's a fine dining, Michelin star restaurant,
another fine dining restaurant
which is more of a market restaurant,
and then there's a gastropub up the road.
Diane leads the kitchen garden.
I work here four days a week
and then we have Sally, as well, who works part-time,
so we work together as a team.
A lot of harvesting involved for the restaurants
and continuously sowing and growing produce
for the restaurants.
- So when I first came here six years ago,
I decided straight away this would be a no-dig garden
and it's really worked and we're really happy with that.
And it means that we have the raised beds
in the kitchen garden, here, which we mulch every year
with our material that we produce from our hotbeds.
We also have, in the fields,
again we use mulching up in the hillside garden.
Everything we can we grow from seed.
We sometimes pot that on
so that the plants are slightly bigger
and the root systems have got more accomplished,
so they stand a better chance
of fighting the Cumbrian weather,
which we haven't really talked about,
but the Cumbrian weather is certainly a challenge to us.
- It's a challenging location, yeah.
- Also, the garden sits under the shadow of the Hall
and for much of the winter,
this kitchen garden here is actually in shade
and can be frosty.
Where everyone else may have thawed out,
the kitchen garden remains a very cold, cold area.
So, our growing season up here is really short,
this year even more so
with the late, late frosts we had in May.
And that growing season, again,
challenges us to find other ways of producing edible foods
through those months
when we can't sow into the ground direct.
And we have to use the polytunnels, the glasshouse,
and especially the hotbeds,
which have been absolutely key to this garden,
right from the start.
And that was just, I suppose, fortune
that I came across the hotbeds
and a gentleman in Yorkshire
very kindly showed me this system and how it worked
and I started reading up a little more about it.
So, the hotbeds are really key
and it's a cyclic process, there,
because the material from the hotbeds
ultimately provides the fertility
that we want going back into the soil.
Feeding the soil is what it's all about.
Feed the soil, get your soil in good health,
keep the structure of the soil.
No till, no dig, it's what we're about.
- [Jo] Late autumn, winter, we'll empty the current hotbeds.
Inside them there'll be the material from the previous year,
which is partially rotted down,
so we move that into another bed,
which we then grow courgettes in.
And then we need to refill the beds, they're very deep
and we pack them full of manure from a local stables,
so it's a mixture of manure and straw.
We have to pack it in, we have to make sure it's level
because the level will drop as it starts to rot down,
but it releases heat.
We build a frame on top of it, when it's cooled down enough
to be able to plant on top of it,
and fill that with compost and then we can plant into it.
There's also some covers, lights that we call them,
the sort of clear plastic covers,
which just give them a bit of protection
through the colder months.
And we can start sowing very early,
which is impossible otherwise, here,
because of the late frosts that we get.
- The chefs in the restaurant here,
they want baby veg, basically,
which means we're harvesting young.
So, when you might allow your beetroot
to get to a really nice size,
we'll be picking them golf ball size,
and the same goes for the turnips, the carrots, the leeks.
But what that does mean, in effect,
is that we can produce several successions
through the growing period.
And it's keeping that going,
so it's constantly keeping records
of when to sow every few weeks,
as you would with your lettuces out in the garden,
you'd be sowing, not all at once, but over a period,
you'd sow every two or three weeks.
And it's quite intensive, in that case, and records are key
and we keep a lot of dates going.
We also produce micro herbs, again, that's quite intensive
but it's done on a regular basis, again, of sowing.
And then we also grow perennial crops, as well,
things like salsify, horseradish.
- Lovage is a very popular one with the chefs.
- Lovage and Jerusalem artichokes, of course,
globe artichokes.
We're just trialing skirret at the moment.
And that's the beauty of this,
we're given almost a free reign
to actually go out and try as many different vegetables,
be they perennial, biannual, annual, as we can.
And the other thing we do
is we grow a lot of edible flowers, don't we?
We want to make the garden beautiful.
We want it to encourage
as many beneficial insects as we can into the garden,
natural predators.
And the chefs come in and they delight in it
'cause they come in with their trays
and they'll harvest these beautiful flowers
and we know they're going, literally,
from their tray into the Hall and onto a plate
and in front of someone.
And the feedback we get
when people come into the garden, the following day,
having eaten in the Hall, is just wonderful, isn't it?
- When they realize
that this is where the produce has come from,
the meal they've just had the evening before.
I think it really delights people.
- It does, more and more people, I think,
are in wanting to know
where their foods come from, basically.
And the fact it's here on the land, in Askham,
in the Hall gardens, means a great deal to them.
(serene music continues)
I would say the harvesting is one of the favorite parts
because all that hard work is suddenly paying off.
And we take a lot of care with the harvest.
We bring it to the sink,
we've got some lovely sinks out here,
we've got a wash station, as it were,
and everything is lovingly washed.
And we take it in
and we're very happy to put it down in front of the chefs
and hope that we can make them smile
because it makes us smile to see it.
To be honest, it's a joyful place to work.
- [Jo] Very rewarding,
knowing that the food that you're growing
is getting used and enjoyed by a lot of people
and the chefs appreciate it.
- [Diane] And we also go further than the garden,
we go to the woods in winter to pick the wild garlic.
We go to get the sloes.
Anything we can forage, we'll go out and get for them
and that, again, (sighs) it's a joy, isn't it?.
- [Jo] It's good to be able to provide, for them,
things that would be very hard for them to get hold of,
so they can use it in their cooking and be creative with it.
- The garden has definitely grown quite a bit since I came.
Initially we realized that the one polytunnel
wasn't going to be enough
just because we needed to produce more
as we were building up clientele in the Hall
and at our sister hotel.
We bought a second polytunnel,
just over a year ago we got our second greenhouse,
which we definitely needed because so much propagation.
And then the field was actually a lockdown project
because come March, everything had shut
but we were still gardening
and we knew we had this opportunity and so we grasped it.
We walked miles every day, basically,
and we even have walkie-talkies now,
because if we're in the field and one of us is down here
and somebody needs something,
you can end up walking a long way just to find people.
And we haven't really
talked about the wider garden here, as well.
The ornamental garden has a lot of edible plants down there,
it isn't just confined to the kitchen garden.
We're looking wherever we can to find more and more
edible flowers and herbs. - To reflect the garden
and the house in the meals and in the stay for the people.
- [Diane] If you've only got a small plot,
don't be afraid to try and put in different plants.
And mixed planting in a small plot, I think is ideal.
And just also bear in mind,
if one's got a deep root and one's got a shallow root
that's better than having them all fight
for the same bit of moisture and rain and food
that's within the soil.
So yeah, I would trial mixed planting
and always put some flowers in there if you can, as well,
to bring in the insects.
- For me, hotbeds were quite a revelation, really,
because you're getting so much
for a relatively small amount of work.
You just need an area about four foot by four foot
and a supply of horse muck, so ideally if you've got stables
or someone with a horse nearby.
Because you're making use of everything,
you're making use of the heat that it generates
and it also produces beautiful material
that you can then put back into your garden afterwards,
and you can extend your season and grow a lot more.
There's a little hillside orchard,
which we're letting the grass grow around it
and it be a little bit wilder.
The forest gardens,
we're experimenting with forest gardening
so very mixed planting, very bio-diverse, hopefully,
to encourage wildlife in.
- [Diane] And we do allow things,
with things that seed in places
like for example, the borage this year
in amongst the potatoes.
As long as they're not actually on the potatoes
we've just allowed them to continue
because nature often does it best.
- Because we want a long season of produce,
there's something flowering right through the year,
so it can almost help the wildlife.
- We have rabbits.
- We do have rabbits.
We try and keep the rabbits out
but we're fairly relaxed about,
in the field, particularly, where we've got a lot of crops,
not going overboard to try and keep the wildlife out.
We can leave a little bit for the wildlife.
- Yeah, we share the strawberries
with the blackbirds. - We share the strawberries.
- [Diane] There is plenty to go around.
- It's an abundance.
I would say one of the things we do to reduce slug damage
is we grow plants on in plugs and then plant them out
when they're already a reasonable size
so they've got a better chance.
If there is a bad infestation, we'll use nematodes.
We only use biological control, we don't use any chemicals.
- We're happy to pick them off the plants
and feed them to the hens,
as our chef is a passionate breeder of hens
and so we have quite a lot of unusual varieties
and that's very useful when it comes to slugs and snails.
We feed them snacks. - They get snacks.
- And the pigs take an awful lot of our produce, as well.
The kitchen waste that is purely vegetative
we feed to our pigs, so they get an amazing diet, actually.
Even strawberries that are slightly rotten,
they absolutely love the strawberries, don't they?
I think, at the moment, we've got quite a lot going on
with the new hillside garden and the forest,
which we'd actually like to encompass
the whole of that hillside garden, eventually
which, hence planting the shrubs, the different layers,
the tree layer, and the shrub layer,
and the ground cover, and the perennials.
So for going forward, I think we don't have the manpower
to expand- - To expand any further.
- [Diane] unless we took on a whole team
because, to be truthful, one day,
we can spend literally more than half the day
just harvesting.
- [Jo] There's quite a lot of planting that we've put in,
particularly in the last year, that's going to mature
that's longer term planting; the trees, the forest garden.
So that's going to mature at the time
and change the nature of the garden.
And the constant improving of the soil and the new beds.
(serene music continues)