A working kitchen garden

Last Saturday we went to Brockwood Park in Bramdean, Hants and visited a fantastic working kitchen garden in the grounds of the school. The garden is 1 1/2 acres and is tended by two gardeners aided by volunteers. It provides produce to The Krishnamurti Centre as well as to Brockwood Park School and produces an amazing 1/3 of the school's veggie requirements. Everything I saw looked very healthy and well tended.

There are 3 huge glass houses  and they were filled with rows of cucumbers, melons, salad stuff and tomatoes. I didn't go into the glass house with the tomatoes but from the door they all looked very healthy and blight free. The plants were at the far end of the house away from the entrance so maybe this has helped prevent them being affected.

The garden was very inspiring but, because of the difference in scale (the area growing courgettes alone was probably bigger than the whole of our garden), I didn't spot anything that I can apply to our own little plot. Maybe when we get our allotment in another 10 years time. Yes, the waiting list for an allotment in Poole is currently over 10 years!

The garden is part of the school so obviously you can't go wandering around willy nilly but the school does have open days and I'm sure that if you visited the Krishnamurti Centre it would be possible to arrange to be shown the garden by one of the staff or volunteers.


Full report of our visit to Brockwood.