The Kitchen Garden

The Kitchen Garden supports the necessity to cut greenhouse gas emissions by reducing food travel miles, packaging and by using sustainable farming practices that don’t rely on fossil fuel inputs. 

In its first year, The Kitchen Garden produced a variety of seasonal crops that our Chefs used in some of our dinner and banqueting menus, as well as in our salad dishes. In the year 2024-25, more than 2 tonnes of fresh produce were grown by the Kitchen Garden project and used directly in our menus. 

The Grounds team have been trialling a range of both heritage and modern varieties, using organic and regenerative growing principles and techniques such as crop rotations, green manures and biological amendments that reduce the reliance on carbon intensive fertilisers.  

 Agroecology 

Agroecology is about how sustainable food and farming systems are designed and managed.  It applies ecological and social principles and includes sustainable practices such as organic farming, regenerative agriculture, agroforestry and IPM (integrated pest management). 

• Principles include crop rotations where the same crop is not grown in the same place for many years to help manage pest and disease.  Restoring soil health through farming is a major contributor to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

• Green manures are used instead of fertilisers – they are plants such as Fabaceae (or Legumes; think beans, peas, pulses) that naturally replenish and store the nitrogen and other nutrients in the soil between cultivating the crops. 

• Techniques such as interplanting, relay cropping and successional sowing all help demonstrate how small, well managed human scale systems can be more productive, resilient and sustainable than larger industrial farming practices. 

• Through regular volunteer sessions and collaborations with colleagues across faculties, new and innovative techniques can be trialled and resilient social capital built.