A unique café where nearly everything is grown, foraged or "intercepted" opens today.

Using home-grown plants and weeds like nettles and dandelions, Old Tree will also use fruit that would otherwise be chucked in the bin.

Based at Field, a temporary space for start-ups and entrepreneurs at the Preston Barracks site on Lewes Road, the café will be open five days a week for breakfast and lunch, serving dishes such as sprouted humus and chickpea wraps, mashed avocado pesto and dehydrated granola - made from sprouted buckwheat, walnuts and hemp seeds.

A “botanical fermentory” is also being built which will provide a wide range of drinks including elderflower champagne, natural ginger beer, botanical cordials and kombucha - a kind of fermented green tea.

There will be seasonal infusions – water flavoured with herbs like rosemary and lavender – as well as raw juices made from “intercepted” fruit. Nick said: “It basically means fruit we’ve acquired one step before it would be put in the bin."

The Old Tree initiative first got going two years ago when ecologist Tom Daniell foraged hundreds of wild elder flowers between Brighton and Lewes to make elderflower champagne. He bottled it and took it to Glastonbury where it was sold to fundraise a creative project in the Green Futures field.

The following January, Tom met philosophy graduate Nick Godshaw on a train and the pair realised they shared a common dream.

Nick said: “It moved very quickly from there. We both knew we wanted to start a business with the aim of funding food forestry and land regeneration. Our goal is to create edible plant landscapes, that is, food systems based on natural and wild landscapes.”

The Old Tree collective, which now involves numerous brewers, makers and gardeners, moved up a gear last year when it joined forces with trendsetting, zero-waste restaurant Silo in Brighton’s North Laine.

After providing nettle beer and elderflower cider for one of Silo’s pre-opening events, Old Tree was contracted to supply all Silo’s drinks and now runs an in-house brewery in the restaurant basement.

At Lewes road, the team has been aided by dozens of enthusiastic local volunteers to turn the once-derelict building in to a useable space, as well as create a one-acre permaculture garden outside. Soon visitors will be able to eat and drink al fresco, surrounded by fruit trees, herbs and nourishing wild edibles such as chickweed and wild garlic.

Nature has also moved indoors - with plant boxes containing herbs and raspberries at the café entrance and numerous trays of sprouting seeds behind the counter.

Nick added: “What we are doing is definitely unique. There are other botanical breweries but we’re the only one that’s so closely linked to food forestry and putting all our profits back in to the land."