Kitchen Garden Open Day Tuesday 22nd October

Book a Table

Calling all Ferry House foodies... Book your table online today!

Book a Table

The Kitchen Garden

AWARD WINNING RESTAURANT WITH KITCHEN GARDEN

The Kitchen Garden is the heart of our restaurant. Homegrown produce & our ‘Plot to Plate’ food provenance is what we live by. What started off as one small lettuce bed in 2013 is now a flourishing garden of almost 1.5 acres, growing an abundance of fresh, seasonal home grown produce, cropped daily to be used across our menus. You’re free to explore the garden on your visit to us, and here’s what you can expect to see.


Kitchen Garden Open Day

Come and have a wander around our Kitchen Garden! Join us on our self guided open day where our Garden Team will be available to answer any of your questions about the produce we grow in our 1.5 acre Kitchen Garden. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see ingredients making their way to our kitchen through the seasons and the chance to try it all for yourself over lunch.

TUESDAY 22ND OCTOBER 11AM-3PM

This is a free event but we would like to encourage guests to RSVP to [email protected].

See How The Garden Grows

OUR HOMEGROWN PRODUCE

Enjoy a quick virtual glimpse of our restaurant’s Kitchen Garden before you visit in person. From the carefully controlled environment in the polytunnel, to the secret orchard overlooking the estuary, our garden is a very special place.

Here we’ll tell you a bit more about our homegrown produce, our ‘Plot to Plate’ food ethos and how we go about maintaining a healthy crop of quality produce year round.

VEGGIE BEDS

Our veg beds grow all sorts of fresh leafy greens and delicious veggies. We grow lettuce, cabbage varieties, sweetcorn, chard and asparagus - just to name a few. You’ll notice some of our patches are covered with protective nets to deter the resident pheasants, rabbits and birds, who like our produce just as much as we do.

POLY TUNNELS

Our two poly tunnels are temperature-controlled tunnels to protect our produce from the elements and provide a peak environment for growth year round. Here is where we grow our numerous varieties of heritage tomatoes, as well as a colourful and flavourful array of peppers, chillies, melons, salad leaves and edible flowers.

FRUIT CAGE

In our fruit cage you’ll find all that is sweet, seasonal and fresh, including numerous varieties of strawberries, raspberries, cherries, rhubarb, currants - and much more besides. The produce here changes year by year, season by season. The outer cage protects the produce from the local wildlife who seem to take a liking to it, so please remember to shut the door behind you as you explore.

SECRET ORCHARD

This is a quiet, scenic part of our Kitchen Garden with views out over the estuary. It’s a lovely space to wander in near complete silent - excepting the grasshoppers humming away - with blossoming trees in the spring, swaying grasses in summer & ripe fruit trees in autumn. It grows varieties of apples and pears, while the surrounding hedgerows are foraged for other seasonal produce like sea buckthorn and rosehips.

HERBS

Our herb garden grows numerous different varieties of herbs to flavour our dishes. Just some of them include wild garlic, dill, parsley, sorrel - and even chocolate mint! These are picked daily to be used in our dishes. Dotted around the garden you’ll also see the edible flowers used to garnish our desserts and our cocktails, which pollinators just love.

GREENHOUSE

A small but integral part of our Kitchen Garden, our greenhouse provides a home for our newly planted seedlings before they’re planted out in the vegetable patches or the poly tunnel. We only plant from seeds and cuttings, so we know exactly where our produce has come from, and our gardeners spend a fair amount of their time here tending them throughout their growth.

FLOWERS & BIODIVERSITY

We promote biodiversity in our garden by planting annual blooms, as well as ‘companion planting’. By planting particular plants and flowers next to our produce we encourage pollinators, including wisteria, chive, lavender and borage flowers, to stave away pests and limit the use of pesticides to near zero.

We grow plants alongside each other that support and help each other thrive, perhaps by offering shade, or by putting certain necessary nutrients into the soil. Peas and beans for instance, add nitrogen to the soil. 

The ‘three sisters’ method involves the growing together of beans, squashes and corn. Beans fix nitrogen into the ground, squashes have a wide leaf that provides cover and shade, to protect against weeds and moisture loss from the soil, while corn offers support to the growing beans. 

HEIRLOOM VARIETIES

Our gardening team and chefs work together in to plan, cultivate and create dishes for our restaurant. Homegrown produce champions seasonal, heirloom varieties not easily found in the shops. Head Gardener Jane Rudd and her team tend to and crop the produce daily, then take it to the capable hands of our chefs. From here our kitchen team use as much as the produce as possible, taking parts that may otherwise be thrown away, such as fruit rinds and stones, to create jams and fruit vinegars.