take a break
Just a stone’s throw from the Hall, the Kitchen Garden at Doddington provides an abundance of fruit, vegetables, salads and herbs which take centre stage on our menus and are regularly for sale in our Farm Shop.
It is likely that there would have been a Kitchen Garden at Doddington from around 1600. As soon as the Hall was built, this garden would have been used to grow fresh produce for the household.
By the 1960s, half of the Kitchen Garden had become fallow, but when Claire, the current owner of Doddington Hall, was growing up, all of her vegetables came from the remaining area still in cultivation.
The pleasure of growing and picking vegetables, preserving them and eating with the seasons is something that was ingrained in Claire from a young age. It is this nostalgia that inspired her project to restore the Kitchen Garden to its former glory.
Thanks to a grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the formerly neglected two-acre walled Kitchen Garden was restored and brought back into production in 2007.
With the help of our gardeners and a brilliant team of volunteers, we implement the best of the traditional techniques such as crop rotation, biological controls and no-dig beds. This naturally maximises productivity and minimises pests so we have no need for chemical fertilisers, weed killers or pesticides.
The abundance of seasonal produce grown here is now sold in our Farm Shop and used in our cafés, restaurant and events catering. Visit in the morning and you will often see our Kitchen Gardener Ellie delivering her daily crop to the chefs and the Farm Shop!
Ellie is the talented kitchen gardener at Doddington Hall. From the two-and-a-half acres of walled garden on the estate, her job is to produce trailer-loads of vegetables, herbs and fruit for the estate’s farm shop, cafés and restaurant.