The estate18 September 20266 min read
The keeper's garden, ninety years on
How a lighthouse family's vegetable plot became the kitchen garden behind every plate at Salt.
Words by Inês Valadares, head gardener
The first keeper planted potatoes, cabbages and a single fig against the south wall. The fig is still there. Everything else has changed, and almost nothing has.
A wall against the wind
On this coast the wind decides what grows. The keepers built a dry stone wall two metres high around half a hectare, and inside it the air is ten degrees warmer on a March morning.
“We don't grow what's fashionable. We grow what the wall lets us grow.”
From the bed to the pass
Every morning at seven the kitchen walks the rows with us. What's ready is on the menu that night; what isn't, waits.
- Forty-two varieties of tomato, saved from seed
- Wild fennel and samphire from the cliff top
- Figs, quince and late lemons against the old wall
