Notes from the garden

Inside the Vinery at Bodorgan: turmeric, chilli and lime - just freshly covered in alpaca manure and topped off with a wood chip mulch, all getting ready for the next growing season. I was talking to someone yesterday about how we grow almost all our own ingredients in this way, and she said something along the lines of ‘you need to let people know you’re for real!’ It made me laugh, because of course it’s perfectly true. Check the ingredients labels of most ‘botanical’ products and they’ll say things like ‘extract of…’ or worse, ‘ whatever-it-is flavour’. You know what that means, right? Some whacking great chemistry lab somewhere has churned out a few million gallons of gunk and called it a botanical. It’s like that joke about how close the vermouth should get to a dry martini (end of the telephone). Once you’ve blasted, boiled and irradiated a beautiful plant to smithereens, what power do you think it’s going to have left in it? So yes, it’s perfectly true, we are for real. We really do grow our own ingredients and cold macerate them for six weeks until all the lovely power of the herbs has been extracted. Just wanted to say, in case you were wondering..