Kitchen garden chef's table at The Yorke Arms

All the dishes on the kitchen garden tasting menu use ingredients grown in the surrounding beds. Atkins says: ‘You are eating food from the earth in the centre of our vegetable garden.’ One of the courses on the menu is finished on the open fire. This could be a pre-dessert or an amuse bouche – something that can be held on a stick and popped over the flames.

Plants that grow wild, scattered near the kitchen garden and local village, also feature strongly in the menu, though for Atkins, their use is more practical than fashionable. She says: ‘I always think it’s a bit overdone, this foraging business. I don’t set out in the morning for a wander – I don’t have that sort of time – but there are tons of stuff growing, so when I walk into work there are plants on the way and by the riverbanks.’

The Yorke Arms is in the tiny village of Ramsgill and Atkins told us: ‘Ramsgill means wild garlic, ramsons, so we’re very big on wild garlic here. Last year we pickled the wild garlic seeds from the flowers – that was just amazing. We collected hundreds of wild garlic flowers and then picked out the seeds and put them in a pickle. We’ve just about finished using them. They were like putting little garlic peppercorns on food – it was really, really good fun.’

Preserving nature’s abundance enables Atkins and her team to use plants from the garden and environs all year long. Atkins told us: ‘I’m big into preserving. We make sloe dust, we make pine dust… Everything in the garden is used – we’ve got tons of fennel, so we make a load of fennel pollen and we’ve had oceans of sorrel, so we preserve it somehow or we dry it. Salting and drying are just fantastic things to do because the flavour is so intense... It is these things that makes one’s food stand out because you get such a great taste in your mouth.’

The garden was built on land that had laid fallow for the previous 70 years. Atkins told us: ‘Originally that piece of land grew potatoes during the war and hadn’t been used since – it was just beautiful land waiting to be used. It hadn’t had fertilisers and sprays put on it prior to that, so it’s a special piece of land and, like everything else, it needs to be treated with respect.’

The garden is run organically and Atkins says they ‘don’t use anything that might affect the vegetables or the taste’. She continues ‘we don’t use slug pellets and things, so we just have to put up with the slugs chomping away and put tea bags and things on them. So from that point of view we are making things very difficult for ourselves all round.’

The space is immaculately kept with raised beds, essential rabbit-proofing and hardly a weed in sight. Atkins told us: ‘We used to have a gardening rota and the chefs had to do it. I thought that was quite healthy, because they could appreciate where the food was coming from and not be quite so ready to chuck it away or to make the wrong cut. But that was a bit idealistic; we all got quite tired. So we are now very fortunate to have two ex-farming boys from Poland (Stan and Valdeck) who tend it and they are just such strong young men, they just whizz through the work – it’s quite a relief really.’

When we visited, there were all manner of exciting edibles being grown – trees and bushes bearing fruit such as gooseberries, plums and apples, alliums like onions, shallots and garlic, salad leaves and lettuces, as well as various types of kale and cabbage. Their radishes were prolific at the time, popping up in all kinds of guises on the menu, and other favourites like potatoes, cucumber, fennel, beetroot, peas, sweetcorn, courgettes, pumpkin and carrots were also growing away happily. Atkins told us: ‘We had awful trouble with our cucumbers, but when we finally got them going (I don’t think our soil was quite right for them) they were quite spectacular and we used them for lovely cucumber and melon gels.’

There were artichokes and asparagus trying their best to grow under the Yorkshire sun, but at the end of a chilly June could only be enjoyed in the first flush of their youth. Atkins says of the climate: ‘There are a lot of problems – frosts and wanting a bit more warmth. But for every gardener, the weather is never right, is it?’

Both the flowers and leaves of the many herbs in the garden flavour and decorate Atkins’ plates at dinner – mint, rosemary, sage, nasturtiums, thyme and coriander, to name but a few. They are also growing borage this year and Atkins says of this: ‘Last year we grew borage for the first time and we found that we could use the stalks as a vegetable – that was exciting!’

They decide as a team, what gets planted in the garden. She says: ‘Everybody is interested, so we do it collectively. We don’t always get it right, but it’s nice. We grew some perilla last year that we were immensely proud of, so we have grown things that we really haven’t used before. That becomes exciting, because you start wrapping things up in leaves and cooking them – we just have to be a bit careful that we check it out thoroughly first before putting it on the menu! I think that is the joy of dining out too, having something that you would not necessarily have at home – so we are striving to do that now.’