From garden to grill - The Victoria Inn

The Victoria Inn champion home-grown produce

Sitting in the quaint village of Llanbedr is the Victoria Inn. The Welsh inn is well known by both its local community and regular visitors for its excellent food, beautiful gardens and friendly team.

We visited the pub and couldn’t help noticing a rather lush garden being tended to. We were introduced to the lovely gardener Paula, who was re-arranging the Sea Holly and took time out of her day to show us around the pub’s allotments and gardens.

It was really fascinating to see how the Victoria Inn uses the land around their pub to create sustainable practices and support wildlife, not to mention how incredible the spaces both looked and smelled!

It's a team effort...

Gemma, our Business Partner at the Victoria Inn takes pride in their large gardens with Ken and Paula being busy members of the team. The pair look after the grounds as well as growing and cultivating their year round fruits, vegetables and herbs.

As Paula showed us round her flourishing greenhouses, vegetable patches and flower beds she explained how she welcomes wild flowers and lets them grow. They looked rather beautiful scattered around. As well as letting flowers grow naturally, she explained that there is some strategy too, with flowers and plants mixed together to complement one another and deter pests. Paula explained that using strongly scented flowers such as Lavender and Marigold can protect crops from unwanted attention. She showed us some more examples of her ‘companion planting’, where she’d planted chives next to her strawberries which support one another’s growth.

The kitchen team get creative...

All the efforts are well appreciated by the kitchen team at the Victoria Inn who create their menus around the ingredients sourced from the gardens. From their herb garden brimming with fragrant oregano, thyme and rosemary to their cucumber cave and green bean wigwams, it’s all well thought out. Leeks are a popular gift to the kitchen as they’re both versatile and behave well once they’re cultivated and land in the kitchen larder. As are their cabbages which also serve many purposes across their menus when they’re in season. Paula said that growing things is both useful to the kitchen and easy to store is important. Other popular home-grown items you’ll find on the menu include rhubarb, courgettes, peppers and tomatoes, to name just a few!

And they keep the pub looking pretty too...

As well as the edible crops, the team maintain the pub’s impressive foliage and florals schemes. With 22 hanging baskets around the pub and a further 20 window boxes all designed individually for the position they sit, it’s a big task to maintain. When chatting with Paula, she said that she designs some of the flower displays specifically with the village in mind, taking up a prime corner location in the community; she said it’s important that it always looks great.

Paula finished off chatting to us by telling us about her Friday morning ritual of wandering the gardens and grounds to cut a fresh bouquet of flowers for the entrance hall each week. Priding herself on them always looking fresh and being seasonal displays, she mentioned her particular favourite being when the Sweet Williams flower, a ‘florists dream’.