Vicky celebrates the late season harvest
This month has been everything we had dreamed of and more; Vallum Kitchen Garden has been awash with colour and has given us the most fantastic rolling harvest.
The best of our home-grown produce has been picked to order and used throughout our Tea Room and Restaurant menus. Lettuce, peas, broad beans, baby carrots and multiple flavours of beetroot have appeared. We’ve served a fantastic starter of beetroot with whipped goat’s curd and a wonderful side dish of gratin of beetroot with gruyère. Beetroot is so versatile, we’ve even blanched the beet tops and popped them in with the panache of garden vegetables.
We’ve also had rocket, pea shoots, mint, rosemary, oregano, parsley, oodles of basil (amazing in tomato and courgette soup and as a fresh pesto), loads of courgettes and courgette flowers (tempura battered), cucumber (ribbons, diced, pickled – you name it), radish (mandolined), petit pois (sautéed) and I have probably forgotten things too.
Mark has hardly been able to keep up with his fortnightly rolling planting of beets, radish and carrot and our customers have loved tasting the produce of the garden, which you can see from both the Tea Room and the Restaurant.
We keep our wedding menus flexible so we can offer garden harvest side dishes and these have been great fun to prepare. The challenge has simply been to get as much colour and flavour on the table as we can and the results have been hugely appreciated by our wedding couples and their guests.
Looking ahead, we’ve planted sprouting broccoli, broccoli, squash, and multiple varieties of kale for the winter. The celeriac is planted out too. It’s another wonder veg, rather like the beetroot. So when this wonderful summer ends there will still be produce to be had.
Farewell summer, and thank you for your bounty…
