Original subtitles

A year has passed on my East Sussex smallholding.

I've been spending more time out of the kitchen and in the garden.

This helps me get away from absolutely everything.

You can't not love this.

Come on!

I've had plenty of successes...

I've got a glut of ingredients that I'm going to be sharing.

And that's a lovely thing.

..and a few failures, too.

I've just been to feed the pigs, and they're not there.

But with the help of my friends and neighbours...

Come on, Stu, get your back into it!

I thought farming was just about animals!

No-one talks about fencing.

..I'm going to bring in more produce...

I'm going to see if I can get some wheat in the ground.

..more livestock...

I've never seen so much poo in a field in all my life!

..and use every inch of my land and garden...

Here we go.

First Wareing potato.

It's hard work, but it's worth it.

..all year round...

You know autumn's just around the corner

when the sun goes behind the clouds.

..because I know a better understanding of ingredients...

So much more to learn, so many new dishes to cook.

..will lead to some incredible new recipes...

This place is on fire.

It just gets better and better and better.

..as I discover the secrets of a kitchen garden.

In my time here on the smallholding,

I've tried to maximise every bit of space I've got,

and that includes a piece of land dedicated to experiments.

So this is the wheat.

Smells good.

So when I was given some wheat grain earlier in the year,

although I was told not to plant it until next spring,

I just couldn't wait.

This is not the right time to be planting it.

But I did do a little bit and I was curious.

And when they first started shooting up,

they looked absolutely incredible, perfect, lovely lines of wheat.

And I was quite surprised because I actually didn't think it would take.

Now the sun is starting to disappear,

you can see it just looks like grass or weeds.

This area was just a bit of fun.

And look at it, dying back.

It can only put some good back into the soil.

I suppose I'd better take my bread sign out.

There's going to be no bread in this bed, that's for sure.

A bread lollipop.

Although a wheat harvest is unlikely this year,

I've had much more success with extending my orchard.

Last year, I planted a whole new area of apple trees

in a previously unused patch of land.

This is the russet.

This one, got tarte tatin written all over it.

There we go. First one in.

Whilst it will still be a few years until these trees bear fruit...

..the more established orchard has had a great season.

I've inherited all these apple trees.

We've got the cooking apples, the eating apples.

There's a lot of apples come off these trees.

And over the years, I've made apple juice, apple vinegar,

lots of apple crumble.

The cows are having them, the pigs are having them.

I've shared a lot with the community,

but there's just too much.

So I want to do something different.

I want to learn how to make cider.

I've got lots of questions.

I want to know if my apples are any good.

And I want to know if they're good enough to make cider.

And where better to get an answer than the West Country?

So I'm travelling to the Newt Hotel in Somerset,

which is home to 65 acres of cider-producing apple trees...

Right, to the orchard.

..grown under the watchful eye of cellar master Greg Carnell.

The classic cider-making weather. Yeah, it's worth getting wet.

On a rainy day like today, a ride in Greg's buggy is the best way

to stay dry and tour this vast orchard.

Best way to make cider is pick the apples off the floor

because they fall when they're ripe.

So picking them from the trees is not ideal.

So we actually let the apples fall before we harvest them up. Oh, OK.

Let's give it a go. Just try a bit of that, see what you think.

It's called a Morgan Sweet.

Quite dry.

It is quite dry, but it's slightly underripe.

Let's see if this is any better because it's on the floor

so it may have ripened up a bit.

Try another bit.

It's definitely got some more sweetness. Definitely sweeter.

The next question I would like to know is,

can you make cider from ANY apples?

The answer to that is absolutely, yes, you can. Really?

Whether it's any good or not is a different thing.

But, yeah, you can. If you made a cider from an eating apple,

you're going to get a very acidic, crisp, light cider.

If you go to try and make it out of Bramleys, for example,

it's going to be pretty much undrinkable.

It's so sharp and acid, it's going to be over-sharp.

I've got both. I've got eaters and I've got Bramley, a lot of Bramleys.

Perfect combination, blend them together. So you're blending

those apples together to give it some sharpness and give it some... Sweetness.

Give it some sweetness and take it off. So it's all about that blend.

It's reassuring to find out

the apples I've got at home have the potential to make

great cider, regardless of being sweet or sour.

Right, what we've got here is the Dabinett apples,

and it's one of the mainstays for a base cider.

So it's a lovely little apple. Small, isn't it? Cider apples

are smaller than eating apples, generally.

It's a bitter, sharp apple, classic, so that's got some tannin in.

Try this. This is going to be different.

And actually, Dabinett is a bitter apple as well.

Ugh! That's not nice.

I feel like my tongue has been through a tumble dryer.

I have to say, I can't imagine that being a good drink.

That's the challenge. OK. So I think, let's go off to the cellar

and try some of that Dabinett cider.

Yeah. Let's do it. Away we go.

Unlike beer, cider is fermented, not brewed...

..with the production process being much

more similar to winemaking.

Wow.

MARCUS CHUCKLES

It looks like Nasa!

So where does it start?

Apple juice goes into the tank. This is where we add the yeast.

The yeast is going to turn the sugar in the apple juice into alcohol.

And that takes in here about anything sort of three to six weeks.

And then we mature it for anywhere between three and six months.

I heard you started as a hobby.

I did. All started for me about 15 years ago,

making a gallon of cider.

And then it just went totally out of control.

So from a hobby to this tells me there's a possibility

I can reach for the stars.

Absolutely. Right. What do I need?

You need to have nice, clean apples. You need to wash them.

Put your juice into your container. Something like that? Exactly.

That's a demijohn, a four-and-a-half-litre demijohn.

And you put a little air lock in the top and leave it in a warm room.

Nothing else? The natural yeast on the apple will actually start fermenting.

And then after about a couple of weeks, you'll see that it stops

bubbling and all the sediment's gone to the bottom at that point,

then all you need is another one of these,

get a siphon and just siphon it into the other one, top it up.

You can just use a 10% sugar solution, put a bung in

to keep the air off, keep it cool,

and then just leave that, leave it alone.

Well, you've talked to me about it and you've told me all about it.

Now, can I taste some? Absolutely. Let's do it. Follow me. Thank you.

Due to the similarities to winemaking,

good quality cider can make the perfect complement to food.

Ah, lunch!

GREG CHUCKLES

With cider. Wow.

Is it like wine, where you have to swirl it around? Absolutely.

Back in 1750, it was the gentry's drink.

And that was...it was on the table instead of wine.

So, this is an 8% palate cleanser.

So you'd pair this with fish, something like sea bass, scallops.

Actually, cider can be drunk and consumed the same way

and paired the same way as a wine.

I can see you've got some beans here.

We do, yeah. We've got some lovely beans there from the estate.

I can quite honestly see why you can call this a wine

because you don't get the nose of an apple.

It's there, but it's...it's fruit. It's delicious. Absolutely.

It smells great. It tastes... Clean, crisp. Yes.

And eaten with the beans

and the dressing and the freshness of the garden,

that combination, that match certainly does work.

This is a different ball game completely.

This is our Dabinett cider.

So it's proper tannic cider.

Its bitterness, you've got astringency,

some green apple going on there as well.

It's a complex, grown-up cider, as we call it.

Are you picking up the astringency and the bitterness, though,

from the tannin? It really does dry your mouth out.

It's almost like a good red wine. Absolutely.

So, we're going to pair this with some lovely British beef.

This Dabinett is an alternative for something like a nice Shiraz.

I actually can't quite believe that

what I was tasting earlier, that was almost inedible,

has turned into that.

That's the brilliance of cider making.

So, this is unoaked cider, pudding cider, we'll call it really,

ice cider.

I can get banana, really strong banana off this, which is part

of the apple profile that's happening on there.

That is brilliant, actually.

I think a glass of that at the end of a meal,

for me, I'd drop a little piece of ice into that,

just for that freshness, that sweet freshness that... I love it.

So you're going to buy a bottle?

No, I'm going to try and make some!

I'm really...I'm really impressed. I really am. Thank you.

I think the pairing, it's on the levels of winemaking.

And it's as interesting as winemaking.

So my expectations have gone through the roof.

One thing I know for sure,

my next box of apples is going straight into the press.

I'm really keen nothing goes to waste.

So using traditional methods to store produce is one solution.

And that's what I'm doing with one of my favourite ingredients.

So I've got a glut of ginger,

and rather than just leave it and then in a few months

or a month from now, throw it away,

I'm preserving it.

Ginger's a little bit of a love-hate thing.

You either like it or you don't. But I love it.

When it's raw and you put it into your cookery, you've got to remember

that you've got to remove it before you serve your dish.

But this way, you can chop it up and you can leave it in.

Great in a curry.

It's quite a fiddly job.

Takes quite a while.

When I'm doing long jobs, whether I'm digging, preserving some ginger,

sometimes I reflect on how I got here.

The people that I've met along the way,

they all have one thing in common.

That was a passion for food.

And in the community of farming, the passion is still the same.

It's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

The ginger needs to boil for about half an hour.

Enough time for me to reflect on the past.

I'm sitting here thinking, years of running my own restaurant,

there's one bit about food that I missed -

it was this, this around me, this kitchen garden.

The farming, the growers, brilliant produce arriving at my back door,

took it all for granted.

Now I'm sitting in my own little Garden of Eden,

it's making me look at food in a completely different way.

So, ginger softening up.

You see, it's changed colour.

I'm adding sugar, peppercorns and cloves

to make a sweet and spicy syrup.

The first thing you get is sweetness.

And then you get this colossal explosion of heat

and warmth in the back of your throat.

That's the true strength of ginger.

Wow. Big flavour.

Once the ginger is soft and sticky, it's ready to be jarred up,

where it should last up to six months unopened.

Looks good, smells good...

..I'm sure it's going to taste good, too.

When I'm not cooking or planting, I'm looking after the livestock.

And today, I'm moving the pigs into the same area

as my newly acquired piglets.

They're living on the other side of the smallholding.

So my neighbour Stu is here with his trailer to help me out.

We're moving them because they've done their job here,

but we're also preparing them for the inevitable.

They're going to go eventually,

but probably more, probably one by one.

And rather than leave one on its own, we're moving them over

with the other pigs so they've got a bit of company.

Let's see how this move goes.

It's never easy getting Mangalica pigs

into the back of a truck, that I do know.

Let's see how this one goes.

What are our chances of getting these straight into the back of that?

Zero. What do you mean, zero?

I reckon that we're going to struggle here.

Go on. Off you go.

This would be a miracle. Crikey!

Hang on. Get the other one as well, let's stay nice and calm.

Go on. Go on.

Mind. Oh! Come on.

MARCUS CLICKS HIS TONGUE

Come on.

Shall I walk in?

Come on. Yeah. Come on.

Come on. I wish I had the food.

The problem is, I didn't expect them to come this close.

No, they're quite inquisitive, aren't they? Come on.

Let's keep them there and I'll get some food.

Of course, there's none in it.

The bag might be enough.

I wonder if I just rattle it, they'll think it is.

We get one in, the other one might just go.

Think they're going to need some feed.

I'll go and get some.

I thought I had some, but I haven't.

These are getting too fat. Why haven't you eaten them yet?

PIG SQUEALS

I'd better go get some food then.

That didn't go very well.

Funny creatures, pigs.

I told him it would be a disaster.

Look at them.

They've got to be the most badly behaved animals,

at least on the farm.

And where food goes, I'm hoping so will the pigs.

Now they go for a bath, look.

Great.

They've spent all winter following me around these woods.

They've not left me alone.

Whenever I'm in here, they're always following me around.

The minute a trailer turns up...

Come on. RATTLES FEED CONTAINER

Come on. Come on. Come on, piggies. Come on.

It's times like this I wish I had names for them.

CONTINUES RATTLING FEED

Come on.

Come on, piggies!

Come on.

CLICKS TONGUE

People often asked why I wanted to be a sheep farmer.

I think this is a good example.

This is not easy.

Stuart, I think it's just going to be one of those days.

I wouldn't mind, but they're not exactly going to the abattoir, are they?

No. Well, they don't know that, I suppose.

Come on. Come on.

Look, they're eating, look. Come on.

Problem is, there's so many sweet chestnuts and things,

that they're just not even hungry, are they?

And they're big now, aren't they? They're huge.

I think it's time, on the back of this,

it's time to get them booked in.

They've just pushed me to the limit now.

It's time to rethink our strategy.

What do you think we should do?

Back the trailer in, put some straw in,

basically turn that into a pig house,

feed them in there for a couple of days.

They can sleep in there, get used to it.

Right. Let's do this.

That'll do.

One feeding trough. A trough and some straw.

With a bit of luck,

they'll find the food and they'll go in there.

You're going to sneak up on them one night,

close the door, job done.

Let's hope they go in.

I suppose that's one-nil to the pigs.

Try again another...

I think that's several-nil to the pigs by now!

I think some fresh straw is our last hope.

It smells good.

Oh, look at that. They like that.

I need a door out of here.

Don't... Tantalisingly close. Don't make any sudden moves.

Come on.

We're this close.

Yes, yes, yes, yes!

Stuart, do your thing.

In they go. TRAILER DOOR SLAMS SHUT

We should have just got some straw in the first place.

You just can't... You can't plan anything, can you, with animals?

All right, let's get them to the woods.

Finally captured,

it's time for them to be moved to the new area with the piglets.

There we go.

Come on, guys. That wasn't so bad.

I love the way they go really cautiously.

Say goodbye to them, Stuart.

That's two more happy pigs. Job done. Yeah.

The kitchen garden and the orchard

have been amazingly productive for me this year.

But looking at the unused spaces around my new trees,

I'm sure I could be planting more in this area.

I've heard about a couple growing food

using a method called forest gardening

that makes use of all their land.

So I've travelled to East Grinstead

to find out more from pioneering planters Charles and Lisa Hooper.

So, a forest garden seem like two different things.

Explain, because I'm curious.

You're creating a forest, if you like, by using

the different layers of the canopy, but you're controlling it,

you're contriving it with the plants that you're putting in. OK.

If you look into how a forest is combined,

there's all different layers. Yes.

That's what we're doing here.

It's all different layers, as it would do naturally.

We started with the tree structure, which is our upper canopy layer.

Then we have the fruit trees,

and then we come into the shrub layers.

We've got a New Zealand flax.

And then below that, we've got currants, we've got redcurrants...

Raspberries. ..raspberries... Solomon's seal.

..then we've got Solomon's seal below that, and...

Then ground cover. ..and then we've got ground cover. Sweet woodruff.

And the hop as the... And we've got a hop climbing up a tree. ..climber.

And below that would be the root vegetable.

Jerusalem artichokes, a classic, you know, rhizome.

So we're trying to utilise basically all available space and light

as much as possible.

It's fundamentally an edible garden.

A food forest is what we're trying to produce. Really?

And I like to think of it like a sort of Garden of Eden, you know,

sort of pluck an apple off a tree or a quince or a medlar

or something like that.

How much variety do you grow?

We've got a lot of berries, redcurrants.

We've got different types of pepper.

We've got mountain pepper and Sichuan pepper.

We've got young lime leaves, we've got artichoke, elaeagnus.

We've got some apple, we've got plums and pears.

We've got some disgusting berries

that we would probably suggest not eating around here.

The aronia chokeberry. Not our favourite thing. So aptly named.

That's for the birds. For the birds.

I mean, yes, and a lot of this is food for the animals.

But that's the other important thing,

that what we're growing isn't just for us.

I mean, a vast majority of it goes to the animals, you know.

I mean, the place is teeming with rabbits, you know,

birds and everything else.

So they all get their fair share.

I agree. I prefer to allow them in now. Yeah. Yeah.

I think my question is, how do you make a forest garden?

What's the recipe?

You might want to think about your soil

and whether you need to improve that.

So, for the first couple of years, we had a carpet of green manure,

of clover and lupin and mustard seed that covered the whole area.

So once you're sort of happy with your soil preparation,

then I think probably the first stage is to think

about the plants that you'd like.

So we put in our trees at the very beginning

and then we sort of planted down from there.

So your trees and then your shrubs and then your lower shrub layer

and eventually your ground cover.

It also sounds like there's a design element in it as well.

Do you design? Yes, I do.

Yeah, I think there is, I think you are..

You're working with nature and you're trying to work out,

yeah, what looks and what feels like a lovely space.

It's not just about producing as much food as you can,

although to some, that would be the reason for doing it. Yes.

And what's so lovely is that, you know, this is not just exclusive

to having lots of land.

You could literally have a very small back garden,

someone who's put a fruit tree in,

and then they've started to think, right,

there's a climber that can go up and some ground cover,

before you know it... Yeah. ..they've got a forest garden.

It's being clever with the space that you've got. Yes.

It becomes harder when you've got big gardens like you have, doesn't it?

Exactly. It totally is, yeah,

Because you've got to put your structure, some structure in.

Much easier in a smaller space.

As I was walking round here, I'm thinking, how could I do this?

I've got the new apple orchard that I've planted

and with the nut trees

and the pine forest down the bottom and all the crab apples,

if anywhere lends itself to a forest garden,

I think it's that area.

I've already got the canvas and I've already got things

on it, and I think I need to go back and just add a little bit more

so that I can recreate my own forest garden.

But I think it just needs a little bit more planning.

Back amongst the trees on my farm,

the pigs have done a great job of clearing the undergrowth.

But now they've been moved to their new home,

there's plenty more cleaning up to do.

I love being out here. Absolutely love it.

Coming out in my scruffy clothes, got a fire going on over there.

You know, I generally spend all day out here.

It's great. I absolutely love it.

There's a lot of work in these woods.

I've been felling the trees that really need to go.

You know, some of them are seriously overgrown.

We've had some massive storms over the years where, you know,

some trees have fallen because they haven't really been taken care of,

and I want to prevent that again.

It's a long job.

This is a job that I'm going to be doing for a long, long, long time.

And it's hungry work.

So I'm taking a break to make a lunch of bangers and mash...

..woodland style.

I've got these beautiful pieces of hazel, nice and straight,

and I'm just...rather than use a metal skewer,

what I'm thinking about doing is just sticking these through the sausages

and just putting them straight over the fire.

I want to give it a go. I've never done it before.

What I've got here are some wild boar sausages from my local butcher.

If I don't eat all three,

I know a certain dog who loves cooked sausages.

There we go.

I'm cooking the bangers over the fire,

turning them every few minutes.

What I love about this type of cookery is that as I seal

the sausages on the fire, it's also bringing the flavour of the wood,

the skewer that's going through it as well.

So you've got a combination, you've got the sausage,

you've got the wood, and then you've got the charcoal.

Delicious.

Just want to get a little bit of colour on the outside.

And then I'm going to sit them on this little brick.

They're not cooked.

They're just sitting there, just caramelised on the outside.

And they can just nicely tick over with the radiant heat

that you've got just there in the corner.

And there's tons of heat coming off those bricks as well.

I've got some red onions for my gravy

that I'm roughly chopping and frying.

What we're looking for now,

just let them gently sweat down.

If your pan is just a little bit too hot, pull it away from the fire,

just flip them over, like so.

And that just incorporates a bit of air onto the pan

and that just brings it down a little bit.

Now it's just gently sizzling away.

Now I'm in control.

Got some lovely herbs here from the garden.

A bit of fresh thyme. A bit more oil.

This was one of the family favourites

in the Wareing household when I was growing up.

My old man loved them.

I remember he used to sit on a Saturday when all the workmen

had gone home at the warehouse,

and we used to have pork pie, bread and onion.

Raw. Raw onions.

You know, when you're young, if your dad eats a raw onion,

you do the same.

In goes a knob of butter.

You can see it just sizzling away

and it's just slightly changed the colour of the onion.

It's just gently caramelised it.

And so you've got the sweetness of the sweating and then you've got

the lovely nutty flavour of the butter turning brown.

That now is ready for my leftover gravy.

It's made from red wine and chicken stock

with a splash of Worcestershire sauce...

..and another knob of butter.

And as you do that, you bring it off the heat.

And just look at the shine that's just come

by just adding that little knob of butter.

It's just completely changed the gravy into a sauce,

a delicious onion sauce.

And just because I'm kneeling in the mud and dirt, it doesn't mean

to say that I can't bring a little bit of that cooking magic,

even into the woodland.

Right, that's ready to go.

I'm just going to lift out my herbs.

Throw them on the fire.

There we have it.

Our lovely onion sauce which I'm going to pour into my little pan.

I'm frying up some leftover spuds with fresh herbs.

Oil first.

Get the potatoes in.

Saute, let the pan cool down.

A few more garden herbs.

Drop in your butter, that will foam to get that lovely nutty flavour.

If you put the butter in at the beginning,

eventually it'll just burn.

So I've got beautiful home-grown potatoes.

Cooked, leftover, makes a perfect lunch.

Doesn't get much better than that.

And a final flourish for the gravy.

Just a little drop of Dijon mustard.

And that just gives it that hidden kick,

that little touch of warm mustard in the background.

That sauce is so rich and delicious.

I tried to leave my chef's head at the restaurant back in London.

But as I start to look at the area around me, the land, the woods,

the kitchen garden, the bees, the orchard... Wow.

..I'd be a fool not to develop them and not to grow things and to build

something for me, my family, for the long-term future and beyond.

I want to leave a legacy here.

I want this place to be magical.