The Garden Team

Phil, Przemeck and Jon are the garden team. They produce vegetables, fruit, and eggs for the catering at the eco conference centre, provide fresh herbs to the family butcher shops and supply herbal ingredients to Neal’s Yard Remedies.

Phil has been on a Biodynamics course, and the team try to follow a lunar calendar for the timing of sowing and planting out. They are continuously composting with grass cuttings, weeding collections and any rejects they might, all recycled by nature.

Kitchen Gardening

The team produce lots of food for our kitchen to accompany the organic meat from our award-winning farm. Fresh vegetables and salads of fantastic quality grow at the walled potager, or 3 small greenhouses. Our menus are seasonal to make the best of each crop as it naturally reaches its peak.

The Physic Garden is a beautiful backdrop to the Dining Room, and provides a convenient supply of fresh herbs and flowers for recipes and dish decoration. Edible flowers here include viola, nasturtium, calendula, and borage. Some of the favourite kitchen herbs are rosemary, lavender, chives, tarragon, sage, thyme, fennel, and mint. Hint: If you’re having an event here and need refreshing, pop out and pick a little sprig of rosemary for a hot herbal infusion.

Orchard fruits

Apples, damsons, plums, blackberries, and raspberries abound in our young orchard areas. A fruit walk planted around the edge of a wood for staff (and to increase biodiversity) provides seasonal delights such as bullaces, blackberries, redcurrants, cherries, apples, crab apples, medlar and quince.

Neals Yard plot & wild harvest

Neal’s Yard Remedies are leading the way in herbal cosmetics and health products – many made with organic ingredients. Here at Sheepdrove we can farm useful organic crops like oats and borage, but the garden team have a dedicated herb plot just for Neal’s Yard, where they grow Lemon Balm, Yarrow, Ribwort Plantain, Catmint, Chamomile, Echinacea, and Wormwood.

Around the farmland the gardeners take wild harvests for Neal’s Yard, gathering wild elderflower, elderberries, hawthorn berries, and nettle leaves. Wild crops also go to Sheepdrove’s kitchen to make elderflower cordial and elderberry jelly.

Juliet’s Garden

The stunning garden surrounding the farmhouse is an artist’s passion. Indeed it has featured in some of Juliet Kindersley’s paintings and on a Sheepdrove Christmas card. Neat miniature lavender hedges line the plots where Phil, Przemeck and Jon assist Juliet in caring for ornamental flowers, food plants and herbs. The gardens are full of wildlife and are packed full of birdboxes and feeders.

Juliet’s small flock of chickens, ducks and geese roam around the woodland garden, ponds and meadows opposite the farmhouse. Eggs from these ultra-free-range birds (“the girls”) make our delicious desserts, quiches, and so on, crafted in the kitchen at the eco conference centre.

Clients at the centre adore our food. Discover more at the section called The Culinary Experience.