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Kitchen Garden

Packed with an enticing mix of ornamentals and edibles, the Kitchen Garden includes local and heritage varieties of fruit and vegetables, as well as unusual crops and plants used in weaving and dyeing

Looking its best in...

  • Spring Look for early crops such as rhubarb, salads and garlic shoots, and the crab apple hedge smothered in blossom
  • Summer Peas, beans, lettuces and kales mingle with sunflowers, marigolds, nasturtiums and sweet peas
  • Autumn It’s harvest time for pumpkins, chillies, brassicas and chard
  • Winter Appreciate the form of trained fruit trees and the woven willow arch

A garden fit for purpose

Now 20 years old, the Kitchen Garden was originally developed to illustrate what could be grown on a windy site and in heavy clay soil. The garden is set out in a series of raised beds that allow the soil to warm up quickly.

The garden’s purpose is to demonstrate new, unusual and heritage selections of edible crops, as well as everyday favourites. A three-year crop rotation is in place, with flowers and herbs growing among the vegetables to deter pests and attract pollinators.

From plot to plate

The garden has evolved to include a forager’s bed, herb bed, dyer’s bed and glasshouse, all for championing self-sufficiency, as well as a clay oven to demonstrate the concept of plot to plate.

The new glasshouse is used for tender plants such as tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, basil and lemon grass, and in the cooler months hardy salad crops are protected here from the weather.

Fruit Garden

Harlow Carr’s Fruit Garden is cleverly contained within the Kitchen Garden. It includes a mini-orchard with step-over apples and an apple arch. These light up the garden in spring with clouds of white and pink blossom.

The varieties of apple grown include red-flushed ‘Discovery’, yellowish ‘Limelight’, striped ‘Ellison’s Orange’ and ‘King of the Pippins’.

A range of berries is also grown here, including cranberries, redcurrants, lingonberries and blueberries.

Crop rotation isn’t essential but is good practice if you have the space. By swapping crops with those from a different plant family, specific host pests and diseases can’t build up year after year. Also, the same nutrients are not depleted from the soil each year.

RHS Garden Harlow Carr Horticulturist

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Get involved

The Royal Horticultural Society is the UK’s leading gardening charity. We aim to enrich everyone’s life through plants, and make the UK a greener and more beautiful place.