Karen Liebreich, 46, cheerfully admits to using children as forced labour. Year 6 from Cavendish School in Chiswick don’t seem too bothered about this; in fact, they seem to be rather enjoying themselves.

The children are hard at work in the kitchen garden at Chiswick House, west London. They are happily clearing ground, planting marigolds, weeding the vegetables and experiencing the new delights of digging up nest eggs of potatoes. The children come for 45-minute sessions, including clearing bindweed and brambles, shovelling gravel and digging new ground — “It’s good for their moral fibre,” says Liebreich, only half-joking.

According to their teacher, only 40% of the school’s children have access to a garden at home, so this is a novelty for many of them. Anyway, it beats double maths.

The garden is in a two-and-a-half-acre walled part of Chiswick House’s grounds that had been closed to the public. “It was a completely neglected secret garden,” says Liebreich.

It seemed the perfect place to start an educational project. “I was shocked how anti-vegetable some of my children’s friends were, based on their parents presenting them as something nasty,” says Liebreich.

She managed to winkle some of the unused land out of Hounslow council, which owns the land, and the kitchen-garden project was set up early last year. With the help of volunteers, paths were hacked through the brambles and space for planting was cleared. Today, the area is bursting with fruit and veg planted by local children.

The project claims to be one of the few working kitchen gardens in London and is laid out to look as attractive as it is productive — “It’s a kitchen garden, which is also a pleasure garden, rather than an allotment,” says Liebreich. The herb bed, for instance, is “loosely” based on a design by John Evelyn, the 17th-century diarist and horticulturalist, and the cutting beds provide flowers that are sold in the park cafe at the weekend.

The self-funded kitchen garden association has about 30 volunteers. Membership is earned by donating “three buckets of sweat” in the form of labour or administration, although there are regular gardening sessions open to all. Payment is in produce, or what is left after the school children have eaten at the end of their sessions (soup, salad, strawberries, and so on). “About half of them had never eaten a fresh pea before,” says Liebreich of the children.

And it is not just the pupils who have learnt a little about the food chain: “One of the teachers thought that cucumbers grew underground.” They now know better.

The Chiswick House Kitchen Garden is open on July 16 for the National Gardens Scheme from 1pm-5pm. For further details, visit www.kitchengarden.org.uk

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