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Salad in the City: How Monkton Garden Feeds L’Escargot Bleu
- Sharon Wilson
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
“I love food!” A familiar refrain that so often means nothing.
If loving food means ogling a cheese‑draped burger on Instagram or inhaling a spice bag, then that’s just entertainment — no different from football or theatre. But, of course, the best football and the best theatre aren’t merely entertainment; they’re about experience, identity and meaning.
Consider the Tartan Army during the 2026 World Cup: their pageantry and humour expressed Scottishness more vividly than any politician’s speech. Or the National Theatre Live production of Othello I saw on International Women’s Day this year — a reminder that the patriarchal worlds inhabited by Desdemona, Bianca and Emilia cannot be equated with a manicure and a glass of Prosecco. Some experiences carry weight; others are just treats or titillations.
Food is the same. You cannot compare a poke of dirty fries with a plate of Boeuf Bourguignon. One fills you; the other speaks of craft, culture, connection and belonging. Loving food, in any meaningful sense, is recognising that food — like theatre or football — becomes powerful when it becomes expressive.
Food, then, has meaning. And that’s why some people don’t just “love food”; they live it.
When Carlo Petrini — founder of the Slow Food movement — died earlier this year, tributes described a man who changed how the world thinks about eating. His message was simple but radical: food is culture, ecology, labour, memory; it is never just a product. But philosophy becomes real only when someone chooses to live it — and in Scotland, that Slow Food philosophy finds its clearest manifestation in Fred Berkmiller and what he is achieving at Monkton Gardens.
On a 1,200‑square‑metre plot outside Edinburgh, Fred, chef/patron of L'Escargot Bleu, has created a vegetable garden that now supplies his restaurant with produce you simply cannot buy. This is not hobby gardening; it is a local agro-economy. Every row of chard, every tangle of beans, every stubborn cabbage is part of a story he’s writing in the fertile East Lothian soil — soil he continually improves. Slow Food argues for soil health, for producers over profit, for flavour rooted in place rather than engineered in factories. Fred’s compost bays, his seeds, his insistence on building fertility rather than buying it — all of this is Slow Food.
And while many restaurants talk about provenance, Fred has spent five years building it.
When we tumble into Monkton Gardens one Sunday, bumping through the iron gates in his old Mercedes Land Rover, the first thing he does is unload coffee grounds and bins of vegetable peelings from his Broughton Street restaurant. Saturday was the last service of the week; the restaurant won’t open again until Wednesday, so this is his Sunday ritual. The food waste goes into the newest composting bay — one of several, each at a different stage of decomposition. He piles grass cuttings on top to keep it warm and let nature do its work. Then he shows me the one‑year‑old compost: dark, earthy, with the texture of fine breadcrumbs. He lifts a handful, smells it, and encourages me to do the same. It is warm, dark and alive. We joke about what a sommelier would make of its ‘nose’.
After a century of farming that stripped soils with synthetic fertilisers and monoculture, Fred is putting back what industrial agriculture took out. Compost restores nitrogen, microbes and organic matter — the very things the Green Revolution bypassed in favour of chemical shortcuts. When he tips coffee grounds and peelings into his bays, he feeds an underground workforce of bacteria, fungi and worms that rebuild structure, fertility and resilience. Compost is the engine of a small circular economy where nothing is lost, and everything returns to the land. As he puts it, bluntly and accurately: “If you start with crap, you cannot produce good food.”
The same philosophy shapes how he thinks about seeds. Fred buys seeds he can save and re‑grow — a practice increasingly rare in modern agriculture. Companies like Bayer‑Monsanto have pushed a system where a handful of uniform varieties dominate the market. It gives them control: higher prices, fewer choices, and farmers who must buy new seed every season. Many commercial seeds don’t reproduce reliably, or the small print forbids saving them at all.
Fred wants nothing to do with that. He aligns himself with the seed‑sovereignty movement — a global pushback against the big boys to keep seeds in the hands of farmers and communities. He mentions Real Seeds in Wales, a company he admires because they don’t just sell seed; they tell you how to reproduce it. No patents, no restrictions — just plants that can live again the following season.
Fred also practises ‘No‑Dig’ gardening which follows a simple principle: leave the soil undisturbed and feed it from the surface. Organic gardening guru Charles Dowding’s research at Homeacres, his Somerset teaching garden, shows that no‑dig beds can match or outperform traditionally dug plots, with fewer weeds and better moisture retention. Compost, as surface mulch, mimics forest processes, reduces weed pressure by up to 75% from the second year, and creates healthier, more resilient soil ecosystems. Fred’s garden — lush, orderly, astonishingly productive — is proof of what No‑Dig can do.
We move on to the greenhouse. Water is a problem at Monkton Gardens, so he works with what he has: large rain‑fed butts lined up beside the door. He dips a metal watering can into the cold water. It’s a rare bright day in East Lothian, the sky a piercing, improbable blue, but I can’t help thinking of how frigid winter gardening is in Scotland and what a commitment Monkton is. Inside the greenhouse though, it is warm and close and as Fred moves down the rows of basil and tomato plants, they release a heady aroma. I ask him about the relationship between the restaurant and the garden.
He tells me that after COVID, he restructured L’Escargot Bleu. The restaurant now opens four days a week instead of six and serves fewer covers — a shift that brings the kitchen into line with the output of Monkton Garden. Instead of ordering freely from vegetable suppliers, he works within the limits of what the garden can give: its quantities, its timings, its varieties.
One outcome is Monkton Salad, a dish that changes with the day’s harvest. It reflects the labour behind the garden and the biodiversity it supports. A serving might include tomatoes with basil, but also edible flowers, chard, rocket, mâche, rapa, radish and a rotating mix of herbs. The composition shifts constantly; uniformity is not the point. What appears on that plate — varied, seasonal, unpredictable — stands in stark contrast to how most of the world now eats.
Today, three‑quarters of the world’s food supply comes from just 12 plant species and five animal species
Let that sink in. It is a concentration that leaves food systems vulnerable. Initiatives such as the Ark of Taste and Dan Saladino’s book Eating to Extinction highlight the erosion of diversity and the cultural knowledge that disappears with it. Techniques including nose‑to‑tail eating, foraging, preserving and fermentation extend the usable range of ingredients. Advocates argue these practices support food security and sovereignty by making better use of what already exists. After all, one‑third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted — roughly 30–40% disappearing between farm and fork. And while the global food system narrows and simplifies, Fred’s corner of East Lothian shows what diversity looks like in practice. Even the smallholding next door releases its ducks and geese each day to eat the slugs that would otherwise go for the vegetables. The arrangement is informal but effective — a small, self‑regulating ecosystem.
Fred, though, extends his soil‑first philosophy beyond vegetables. L’ Escargot Bleu is Pasture for Life certified. The Association champions the unique quality of meat raised exclusively on pasture, along with the wider environmental and animal‑welfare benefits that genuinely grass‑fed systems deliver. For him, sourcing is part of the same closed‑loop thinking - meat that reflects the landscape it comes from, grown with the same attention to soil health and biodiversity that shapes the vegetables outside his kitchen door. And so, the philosophy that starts in the soil ends in the saucepan: meat and vegetables worked into stock, every stock reduced into sauce, every sauce carrying the richness, nutrition and integrity of the landscape it came from.
What all of this shows is that food is never just the thing on the plate. It is soil and seed, labour and landscape, animals raised with care, vegetables grown in living earth, choices made slowly and deliberately. In Fred’s world, the garden, the herd, the craft and the kitchen are not separate stories but one continuous line. And when that line reaches the table, the result isn’t simply something to eat — it’s a reminder that food has meaning.
And here’s the thing that cuts through all the theory: this food tastes better.
As we walk through the garden, I’m handed leaves and stems and pods — carrot tops, herbs, peas, onion shoots, radish, and then raw asparagus, so fresh and intense it makes me question why I ever cook it. The flavour isn’t an accident; it’s the outcome of everything we’ve traced — soil left undisturbed, biodiversity protected, choices made with patience rather than convenience. When you taste something grown in a living system, tended by people who care, it stops being just food and becomes a way of understanding where you are and what matters on our one precious earth.
Monkton Garden makes you really love food.
