The Farm is Merging With Food Retail Spaces

By: Sylvain Charlebois

July 13, 2021

Canadians have started to notice that grocers have begun to sell plants in miniature greenhouses.

We’ve seen gardens on rooftops, vertical farms close to stores and even some selling gardening equipment to gardeners who are shopping for food. The farm is essentially merging with the food retail spaces we roam as consumers. It’s quite interesting.

We’re slowly witnessing the rise of the ‘grow-cer.’

For years, customers accepted the myth that food just magically shows up at the grocery store. But COVID-19 got many of us to think differently about supply chains – how food is grown, produced, transported, packaged and retailed.

With the addition of new farmgate features for city dwellers, grocery stores are slowly becoming the gateway to an entire world most of us rarely see: farming.

Sobeys has provided one recent example of what’s going on. The second-largest grocer in Canada recently signed a partnership agreement with German-based Infarm to get greenhouses into many outlets across the country. Infarm units were installed last year in British Columbia and can now be found in many other locations across the country.

Infarm units enable Sobeys to offer fresh herbs and produce grown hydroponically, which requires 95 percent less water, 90 percent less transportation, and 75 percent less fertilizer than industrial agriculture. And no pesticides are used.

Available produce grown inside the store includes leafy greens, lettuce, kale, and herbs such as basil, cilantro, mint and parsley. Expansion plans include chili peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes. The growing cycle for most of these averages five weeks.

While Sobeys doesn’t have to worry about infrastructure and extra capital to change a store’s allure, it can get rid of these miniature vertical farms if proven unpopular or unnecessary. That works well for Sobeys and the consumer.

But it’s not just Sobeys. Other grocers now have decent-sized vertical farms inside the store or close to them.

The gardening rate in Canada has gone up by more than 20 per cent since the start of the pandemic last year. For consumers, growing their own food was about pride and taking control of their supply chain in some way.

For many others, though, gardening remains a luxury due to the lack of space or time. Since a trip to the grocery store is inevitable for most of us, grocers are bringing the farm to the store so consumers can have both the farming and the retail experience at once.

Before COVID, farmers desperately tried to get closer to city dwellers so their work could be appreciated. Campaigns over the years brought mixed results. Farming is still largely misunderstood.

Debates on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the use of chemicals have also divided urban and rural communities. City dwellers have always respected farmers and the hard work they do. But many consumers who are/were looking for natural and organically-produced goods have grown leery of farming in general.

This has attracted the attention of environmental groups opposed to many farming practices.

Grocers are starting to realize that bridging two worlds under one roof can help elevate their roles as ambassadors to an entire supply chain. Farmers can’t be replaced, of course, and they can’t be in stores.

For years, we saw pictures of farmers on packages and posters. It was nice, but it wasn’t real. The hard work, and everything else that comes with farming, can only be properly conveyed when visiting a farm or working on one for a while.

The pictures likely won’t disappear from grocery stores but they don’t really tell the whole story.

The new grow-cer brings the imagery of farming in retail to a new level. Grabbing a living plant or produce off a living plant is certainly real and increasingly valuable for Canadians longing for local and freshness. It just can’t get more local than growing it in the grocery store.

COVID-19 eliminated many rules for grocers. Every business played a part. Grocers sold food, processors manufactured it, and restaurants provided ready-to-eat solutions. Lines between sectors were already becoming blurred before COVID, given the crossing of concepts and elimination of lines between sectors.

For example, some of us have heard of the ‘grocerant’ concept, which has embedded food service into grocery stores. Consumers can relax, enjoy food before, during or after their grocery shopping.

But COVID blew up the blurred lines.

Grocers are becoming brokers, connecting various functions of the supply chain. Farming connects with retail by way of new initiatives that we’re now seeing everywhere.

For example, restaurants are selling meal kits through grocers’ apps. Few saw that coming.

Food brokering for grocers is no doubt the next frontier of growth.

Whether it will last is unknown. But grocers are embracing the fact they have the privilege of interacting with consumers every day. That privilege, more than ever, comes with a responsibility to show consumers the true value of food by being knowledge brokers.

If that means growing more food in stores, so be it.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

Verdeat Is Launching A Kickstarter For Its Hydroponic Garden System For The Home

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By Jennifer Marston

June 26, 2019

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Image via Verdeat.

Poznań, Poland-based company Verdeat announced this week it will launch a Kickstarter campaign in July for its modular vertical farm meant to fit inside apartments, offices, and other non-commercial spaces.

Like other indoor hydroponic grow systems, Verdeat is able to cultivate most plants without the use of soil, though unlike a lot of systems, the 35 cm cylindrical device will still accommodate soil in certain configurations. The modular trays that come with the device can be switched out based on what you’re trying to grow, whether seeds and sprouts, which get planted in a substrate (like coconut fiber), or a potted basil plant you nabbed at the grocery store.

The entire system is controlled by a smartphone app that takes the majority of the guesswork out of the growing process, from knowing how much water to give each type of plant to how to adjust the LEDs to produce the right amount of sun-like light. The user simply fills the grow tray, adds some nutrients, and starts the app, which, according to an email from Verdeat, can run the farm more or less autonomously, only requiring the user to add nutrients every one to three weeks depending on the plants. The company also claims that plants in the Verdeat system grow faster and ripen 40 percent sooner than traditionally grown herbs and vegetables. At the moment, Verdeat’s system can grow the usual selection of herbs and leafy greens found in most vertical farms, as well as strawberries, peppers, blueberries, and other fruits.

Once the Kickstarter campaign launches, backers will be able to choose from a small, medium, or large device, depending on their individual space requirements. Remember earlier this year when The Spoon looked at vertical farms that would fit into closet-sized apartments? Verdeat definitely fits that criteria. It’s also reminiscent of the self-watering, hydroponic farm-in-a-pillar Zooey Deschanel is currently selling via her startup Lettuce Grow, and of Seedo, whose self-contained, airtight farm looks like a mini fridge.

In fact, with the vertical farming market expected to be worth $9.96 billion by 2025, we’ll see many more of these at-home versions of the vertical farm surfacing alongside more industrial-sized, hyper-automated counterparts.

How Verdeat fares amid all this competition will depend largely on some factors the company hasn’t yet released, including the cost of each device unit, how widely available it will be (it’s manufactured in the EU), and how long backers will have to wait before they can actually get their hands on the device and start growing. If they get their hands on it: As we’ve seen with other crowdfunded hardware projects, there is always the possibility that the product might not make it to market as promised. But perhaps manufacturing right there in the EU, will make it easier for Verdeat to keep tabs on the process and avoid those pitfalls.

The Kickstarter campaign will launch at the very beginning of July.

Italy: Lidl Trials Its First Shop To Have An Urban Garden

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Spanish retailers follow the trend

A few weeks ago people were talking about the plans of El Corte Ingles to install a vertical garden in their store in Valladolid, now their focus is on Lidl, which has put into operation its first store in the world with an urban garden.

The discount company has opened this pioneer establishment in the Italian city of Turin. The store has 1,400 square meters of plant spaces on the roof of the building, which will be managed by Re.Te, a non-profit association that develops cooperation and social inclusion projects for people in need.

"Today we are not only here to inaugurate a new point of sale, but also to announce a unique project: the first Lidl store in the world, and there are already more than 10,500 of them, with a urban garden on the roof," stated the Regional director of Lidl Italy, Maurizio Cellini.

The urban garden will be administered in collaboration with other associations and will be entrusted to the inhabitants of the neighborhood, taking into account their income, work and personal situation.

"This is a story of which we are particularly proud and which expresses Lidl's willingness to meet the needs of the territory and to be part of a social inclusion project that will feature neighborhood families," added the director.

In this sense, the vice president of Re.Te, Luca Giliberti, stated that the urban garden would be administered in collaboration with other associations and would be entrusted to the inhabitants of the neighborhood, taking into account their income, work and personal situation.

The gardens will be used for awareness activities for school groups and labor reintegration, as well as to test agricultural techniques to combat the effects of climate change and support international agricultural projects in Latin America, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa.

The new store offers an assortment of more than 2,000 items, 80% of which are manufactured in Italy. It is also equipped with photovoltaic panels to reduce energy needs.

In this way, Lidl joins the trend of developing vertical and urban projects in food distribution, especially at the international level. In fact, similar initiatives have already been launched by chains such as Carrefour, Auchan Retail, and Mercadona. Specialized retail has also started to implement projects of this type, just as Ikea has recently done in Sweden.

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Source: revistainforetail.com 

Publication date: 4/17/2019 

Farm Refreshed: UrbanKisaan

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Prabalika M. Borah

MARCH 19, 2019

Urban Kisaan seeks to revolutionise the concept of urban gardens with hydroponic farming methods

A chance meeting with a scientist led this accounts person to set up UrbanKisaan, a startup involved with farming. Vihari Kanukollu a Certified Management Accountant (CMA) who met Sairam, a scientist at a spiritual retreat, broached the topic of farming and water scarcity and concerns about the future of farming in a water-scarce world.

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“Dr Sairam invited me to his home. I accepted the offer. There I was spellbound and surprised at the same time when Sairam showed me his little experiment — a vertical hydroponic garden set up in his balcony that was thriving and had been providing him with a healthy yield for many months. Though I am a commerce graduate, I also closely looked at the food crisis we will be facing in the years to come and thinking what do we do. Social causes are close to my heart so I wasn’t ready to give up,” says Vihari.

Together with Sairam, a biotechnology scientist, and Srinivas Chaganti who has done Masters in Computer Science Vihari gave birth to UrbanKisaan. This two-year-old startup has emerged among the top 100 social entrepreneurs in India as per Action For India (AFI) forum; it is one of the top 8 startups to be featured by Discovery India for its documentary series Planet Healers to be aired on March 29.

Their farm in Mahbubnagar, about 80 kilometres from the city, doubles up UrbanKisaan’s research area. The leased out land gives a peek into the future of farming the world over. “Especially because it conserves water,” adds Vihari.

Soil free but nutrient-rich Vihari vouches their startup grows pesticide-free produce in a vertical hydroponic environment. Hydroponics is a method of growing terrestrial plants without soil, by using mineral nutrient solutions in water. Though the farms grow plants in water, they use 95% less water. UrbanKisaan manages everything from the seeds to its proprietary, “farm-controlling software system and also empowers people to grow their own safe, fresh and high-quality food,” shares Vihari.

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What spurred Urbankissan

Sairam developed the nutrient solution for their start up. “As you all know Hydroponic farming is a soil-less farming technique that replaces soil with nutrient solution; so it can be used to grow crops indoors. With timely nutrition and light, these plants do not need pesticides. Hydroponic farms are ideal for the urban environment and can give city dwellers access to fresh produce every day right from their own kitchen or rooftop,” explains Vihari. You can grow almost anything — vegetables and berries, greens, herbs, cauliflower as well as peppers — provided you have the right potting techniques and nutrient mix.

Ensuring food safety UrbanKisaan is different from other Hydroponic farms in the way that they are developing this farming technique for urban homes that have less space. “Before getting down to start the farm and research center, we used Dr Sairam’s hydroponic home set up as the prototype and sold home kits to raise the money. Our home kits sell between ₹ 15000 to ₹ 50000, depending on how big a vertical hydroponic garden you want,” says Vihari.

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At the farm, my attention goes to the over-grown plants. Have they been over-fed I asked, “No they are seed-bearing plants we grow for seed saving for our nursery,” says Vihari.

If you are still sceptical, “Come see our farm that double up as a store, in Jubilee Hills,” smiles Vihari.

Their store in Jubilee Hills opens in the first week of April.

Video: Australian Gardener Harvests Over 400 Kilos of Food From Her Gardens

Kat Lavers describes her approach to gardening, including vertical and biointensive growing, and how important it is – and possible! – for city dwellers to be food resilient in the face of natural, financial and social crises.

Happen Films
Feb 22, 2019
(Must see film. Mike)

Excerpt:

In response to space constraints, Kat trades homegrown persimmons for an annual supply of pumpkins, and buys a bag of potatoes every year. Almost all other herbs, veg and fruit are grown onsite. Gifting and swapping with family and friends adds extra variety to the diet. The garden emphasizes highly productive, resilient fruit trees and perennial vegetables like wild rocket, perennial leeks and bunching onions that thrive with minimal maintenance.

In 2018 the site recorded 428 kg of fresh produce, a figure which the household believes could ultimately grow to around 500kg when the full design is implemented. About half this produce is from the 20m² kitchen garden (30m² including paths).

The garden is maintained with approximately half a day each week, though this is unevenly distributed throughout the season. Surplus is preserved using bottling, drying, freezing and fermenting to supply the kitchen during the leaner months.

A covey of Japanese quails provides the household with eggs and occasional meat. The small aviary has trigger feeders and waterers for easy maintenance, as well as a deep litter floor of thick wood chips and autumn leaves that eventually breaks down into compost for the kitchen garden.

Read the complete article here. 

Introduction To Upside Down Gardening

Gardening, with the aim of providing your own food, has experienced a resurgence over the last few years.

More and more of us are looking for ways to reduce our food bills, decrease our carbon footprint, and eat healthier.

Those with gardens or access to an allotment find it easier to grow their own food, but what about those of us who live in apartments?

Apartment dwellers have much less space to work with and this obstacle stops many budding gardeners in their tracks.

That is why we were excited to learn about upside down gardening, it grants everyone the opportunity to grow their own vegetables regardless of available space.

Here’s what the experts at Fantastic Gardeners advise in order to get yourself up to speed with an upside-down garden.

Upside-down gardening - definition

Upside down gardening is growing plants in pots suspended from the ceiling.

This style of gardening started to gain popularity in 1998 when gardener Kathi Lael Morris showed that it is possible to grow tomatoes and peppers in hanging pots.

Many traditional gardeners viewed this style of gardening as a fad with little chance of being widely adopted.

Unsurprisingly, people with no garden space quickly realised the benefits of this method and how they were no longer excluded from being able to grow their own food.

What plants can you grow upside down?

Most plants can be grown upside down, but those which benefit the most include:

• Tomatoes;

• Peppers;

• Eggplants;

• Cucumbers;

• Squash;

• Beans;

• Various herbs.

If you want to get the most out of your available space, you can consider planting herbs at the top of the hanging pots instead of planting them separately.

Benefits of upside down gardening

Upside down gardening presents benefits to those with gardens as well as those without, however, the advantages are more apparent in urban environments.

• Pests – As the plants don’t come into contact with the ground there is a much, much smaller chance that they will be affected by pests such as aphids.

• Space – This is the biggest benefit offered by upside down gardening, you don’t need a garden or a lot of space.

• Rot/disease resistance – Another advantage of the plant not touching the ground is that the roots, stems, and fruit are less susceptible to rotting or contracting a disease.

• Staking – Since the plants grow downwards you don’t need to stake them to optimise growth.

• Weeding – Growing plants traditionally requires a lot of time and attention, most of which is taken up by the need to weed.

What you need to get started?

Upside-down gardening of tomato

Creating your personal hanging garden of Babylon does require some supplies and a little bit of work, but it will be worth it when you can eat hand grown produce.

​What you need:

• A strong hook

• Strong string or metal wire

• A 7.5cm (six inch) circle of foam or sponge

• Lightweight soil or compost

• A large bucket

• A sharp knife

• A marker pen

• A tray to catch water

• A young plant

When you have collected your supplies simply follow the steps below:

1. Find the sunniest area of your home and mark the ceiling where the pots will be,

2. Install the hook,

3. Now turn your bucket upside down and draw a 5cm (2 inches) circle in the centre,

4. Using the knife, carefully cut around the circle to make a hole,

5. Turn the bucket back around and make three evenly spaced holes roughly 2.5cm (1 inch) down from the lip of the bucket,

6. Tie the string or metal wire through each hole to make three loops that are the same size,

7. Cut a 1.75cm (half an inch) hole in the middle of the sponge (or foam) then cut a line running from the hole to the outside,

8. Place the bucket on its side and carefully thread the roots through the hole in the bottom, make sure the plant is on the outside of the bucket,

9. Secure the plant by placing the sponge (or foam) around the base of the plant inside the bucket,

10. Have someone hold the bucket off of the ground and add soil until it is roughly half full,

11. Water until the soil is moist,

12. Add more soil until the bucket is roughly three quarters full,

13. Hang the bucket,

14. Place the water catcher beneath the bucket,

15. Water the plant again until the new soil is also moist.

The great thing about using buckets instead of large plant pots is that you can decorate the buckets.

Take this opportunity to release your inner artist and introduce some bright colours or funky designs to your home.

Decorating the buckets and creating a hanging kitchen garden is an enjoyable, learning activity for teaching children about where food comes from as well as how to care for plants.

​Caring for an upside down garden

Looking after your new hanging garden is quite easy since you don’t have to worry about weeds or pests. All you need to do is:

• Remove any dead or dying leaves;

• Water the plants daily during hot, dry periods;

• Water every other day during the rest of the year;

• Harvest any ripe fruit and vegetables.

So there it is your guide on how to grow a hanging kitchen garden. With this style of urban gardening, you’ll be eating home-grown fruit and veg in no time, regardless of whether you have a garden or not.

This is a guest post provided by Fantastic Gardeners, a garden maintenance and landscaping company, based in London and Manchester, United Kingdom.

This Toronto Skyscraper Is Covered With 450 Trees

BY EILLIE ANZILOTTI

Toronto has long been serious about its urban canopy. The Ontario city is already home to around 10 million trees, which cover around 26% of the city. The current mayor, John Tory, wants to grow that to 40%.

Brisbin Brook Beynon, a local architecture firm, is already giving the city a leg up on that goal, albeit in an unconventional way: a 27-story residential building that will be covered with around 450 trees, growing on its balconies and roofs. This “vertical forest,” as BBB terms it, takes inspiration from the Bosco Verticale–residential towers in Milan that went up in 2014 with as many as 11,000 plants lining the sides. Since then, copycat buildings have been built in cities like Nanjing and in Taiwan–designed to combat pollution and prove that green space does not need to be limited to the ground. This latest iteration could open as early as later next year.

[Image: Brisbin Brook Beynon]

For Brian Brisbin, principal at BBB, bringing the vertical forest concept to Toronto aligned perfectly with the mayor’s goals for increasing tree coverage. And when he began researching the concept by studying the Bosco Verticale, he realized that all of the technology that enabled the Milanese building to function originated in Canada and North America. “That felt fairly profound,” Brisbin says.

And it also, Brisbin says, made bringing the concept to Toronto feel much more feasible. “We have a lot of depth of specialty in this area in Toronto, with horticultural and agricultural universities and research facilities,” he says, “and we’ve brought a lot of together to take a very science-based approach to developing this project.”

The team behind BBB’s vertical forest includes experts like Robert Wright, the dean of the faculty of forestry at University of Toronto, researchers from the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, which researches the viability of tree species in urban areas, and Vanden Bussche Irrigation, which develops horticultural technology. Together, the team has developed a specialized system to monitor and irrigate all 450 trees. Currently, the trees are growing offsite at a nursery managed by PAO Horticultural outside of the city. Planted in their own portable woven stainless steel planters, the trees–half conifers, half deciduous–will eventually be scattered evenly across the building’s exterior terrace surfaces. A monitored system integrated into the building will connect with all of the planters to track key metrics for each of the trees–amount of water, nutrient density, and external conditions like wind strength.

[Image: Brisbin Brook Beynon]

“We have this saying that there’s no management without metrics,” Wright says. Part of the strategy for the building is to hire a dedicated maintenance team, who will navigate throughout the many balconies, caring for the trees. Especially as Toronto faces extreme weather variability–dipping down as low as –22 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter and up to the 90s in the summer–having a team on hand to monitor the trees’ metrics and ensure their health will be key. This, Wright says, is a crucial task across the whole city of Toronto’s urban forestry efforts, but the height of the vertical forest compounds the urgency. “It’s one thing if a branch drops 20 feet to the ground, and quite another for one to drop 200 feet off a balcony,” he says.

While covering buildings in trees will not alone help cities like Toronto achieve their urban canopy goals, projects like these certainly deliver benefits to the surrounding area (though they also have some critics), like cleaner air and more space for birds and pollinator species, which will in turn assist more mainstream green infrastructure projects. Toronto, for instance, has made strides to increase the presence of green roofs of city buildings, and projects like the vertical forest could act, Brisbin says, “as a sustainable microclimate between these horizontal green spaces on roofs and on the ground” and direct pollinator species between the two.

Because projects like this are still new, the price tag for living in the building will be steep, Brisbin says. While final prices for the units are not yet set, as the vertical forest is still in the process of gaining approval from the city, tenants and buyers will have to pay a premium to fund the maintenance team that will keep the greenery alive and thriving. “And it involves a lot of science, data, and research to develop,” Brisbin says. The team is conscious of the fact that the high cost of living in the vertical forest perpetuates an unfortunate and longstanding urban divide: Areas where poorer residents live often lack good green infrastructure, whereas wealthier residents tend to live on tree-lined streets. “But what we’re hoping is that once we develop the system and the partnership with the farms that are growing the trees, all of that will be available directly to any other project, whether it be public housing or private development,” he adds.

Imagining The Impossible: The Futuristic Designs of Vincent Callebaut

Adam Williams

July 24th, 2018

New Atlas takes a look at Vincent Callebaut's most interesting architectural designs (Credit: Vincent Callebaut Architectures)

Sometimes outlandish, often fantastical, but always compelling, Vincent Callebaut's projects range from realizable ideas like towers covered in greenery to conceptual works depicting a near-future in which architecture, technology, and nature are blended to make cities a more pleasant – and sustainable – place to live.

The Belgian architect heads his firm Vincent Callebaut Architectures in Paris, France. Over the years he has developed a recognizable design language that draws inspiration from nature and makes liberal use of honeycomb patterns and complex geometry. He seems poised for greater prominence now though, as at least two of his projects are due to be built in the next few years.

Let's take a look at some of his most interesting designs.

5 Farming Bridges

Now that the so-called Islamic State has been expelled from Mosul, Iraq, the reconstruction of the city can begin. The 5 Farming Bridges proposal involves rebuilding a like number of bridges destroyed during the fighting and using them as residential units and urban farms. Existing rubble would be used as building material, with flying drones and spider-like robots doing the actual construction.

Manta Ray

The Manta Ray proposal envisions a manta ray-shaped ferry terminal in Seoul, South Korea. The remarkable-looking building would float in place to deal with seasonal flooding and sport a huge roof covered with a solar power array, along with a wind turbine farm. Biodegradable waste and high-tech water turbines would transform the river's kinetic energy into power too – all of which would allow the ferry terminal to power itself and send a surplus to Seoul.

2050 Paris Smart City

Created for a competition seeking ideas to turn the City of Light into a City of Green in the coming decades, 2050 Paris Smart City calls for 15 new sustainable towers to be built on the rooftops of existing buildings on the city's famous Rue De Rivoli. The towers would feature residential units and sport dragonfly-shaped solar panels on their facade, providing all required electricity for the project.

Nautilus Eco-Resort

The Nautilus Eco-Resort is a paradise imagined for the Philippines that would allow well-heeled tourists to vacation without polluting the planet (excepting on the flight there, presumably). The whole thing would be arranged into a shape inspired by the Fibonacci sequence and include a dozen spiral hotel towers that rotate to follow the sun. Nearby, a like number of sea snail-shaped buildings would include exhibition spaces and hotels, while at its center would be a large timber building covered with vegetable gardens and orchards.

Tour & Taxis

Callebaut's Tour & Taxis sees the Belgian architect propose a return to his home country to transform a former industrial area in Brussels into a vibrant sustainable community. The area would comprise three ski jump-shaped high-rises that would be topped by solar panels and covered in greenery. Other notable elements include wind turbines, rainwater harvesting, and the production of fruit and vegetables.

Hyperions

Hyperions consists of a cluster of connected timber towers in New Delhi, India, that are named after, and take design cues from, the world's tallest living tree. It will boast extensive greenery and enable occupants to grow their own vegetables on balconies, as well as the facades, the rooftops, and in specialized greenhouses. The interior is taken up by apartments, student housing, and office space, and it will all be powered by solar panels. According to Callebaut, this one is going to be built and is due to be completed by 2022.

Agora Garden Tower

It can be difficult to imagine how exactly all these renders would translate into brick and mortar buildings, but Taipei's Agora Garden Tower shows the way. Sporting a twisting form inspired by DNA's double helix shape, the building twists 4.5 degrees each floor, turning a total of 90 degrees in all. Once completed, it'll feature 23,000 trees, as well as a rainwater capture system and solar power.

How Georgia O’Keeffe’s Garden Keeps Growing, Three Decades After Her Death

August 14, 2018, Casey Lesser

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Georgia O’Keeffe

From the River – Pale, 1959

While traveling in rural New Mexico in the 1930s, Georgia O’Keeffe first set her sights on a forlorn property perched remotely on a plateau in Abiquiú, New Mexico. In 1940, she’d buy a home at Ghost Ranch, a short drive away, but it left something to be desired. “I was living and painting at Ghost Ranch, but I kept returning to Abiquiú to look around,” O’Keeffe told Architectural Digest in 1981. “The garden pleased me enormously.”

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"Georgia O'Keeffe" at Tate Modern, London

Maria Chabot, Georgia O’Keeffe in the Abiquiú Garden, 1944. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

O’Keeffe, who is known to have been an extremely healthy eater, had wanted a garden to grow her own produce. She’d expressed frustrations that, while living in Ghost Ranch, by the time she got home from the nearest market (either in Española or Santa Fe), her lettuces would be wilted. So, in 1945, when she purchased the Abiquiú property—a ruin that had belonged to the Catholic archdiocese of Santa Fe—she hired help to repair the buildings and turn them into a home and studio, but also to till the land and plant a garden. She’d later hire a gardener, a local named Estiben Suazo; under his supervision, it flourished. Over the next four decades (until O’Keeffe died in 1986), the garden would be a source of fresh produce and year-round preserves, but also joy and solace—and it still is today.

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Abiquiú House Gardens Outside of Kitchen, 2010. Photo by Paul Hester and Lisa Hardaway. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Indeed, the garden is one of the highlights of a visit to the Abiquiú home and studio, which has been overseen by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum since 2006, and is accessible to the public via guided tours. (Hers is among a long tradition of gardens created by artists for inspiration and enjoyment.) With its original layout and adobe irrigation ditch, the garden sits across a series of terraces over nearly an acre of land beside the house. It bears everything from lilacs and day lillies, to kale and chard, to the fruits of a small orchard of apricot, peach, pear, and apple trees. Though it’s not all the same as what grew in O’Keeffe’s time, her former gardener still has a presence: Suazo taught his grandchildren how to care for the Abiquiú garden and the grounds, which they continue to do.

“[Suazo’s] work in the garden was meticulous.…He knew exactly what Ms. O’Keeffe wanted, and what she liked or disliked,” explained Agapita Lopez, Suazo’s granddaughter who was a private aid and secretary for O’Keeffe beginning in 1974, and is now the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s director of historic properties. “But Ms. O’Keeffe herself would say that they sometimes would get into a battle when it came to planting the garden,” she added with a laugh.

“She would say he had a mind of his own, and he wanted to do things his way,” Lopez continued. “Whatever they did, they must’ve compromised, because the gardens were always lush and fertile, and yielded a lot of produce.” Harvests from the garden would become O’Keeffe’s vegetable-rich salads, soups, and other dishes. “She was, I would say, into organic gardening before it was the norm,” Lopez offered, adding that the artist was not, however, a vegetarian.

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Abiquiú Garden Ditch from the Room Looking South and West, 2010. Photo by Paul Hester and Lisa Hardaway. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Beginning in the early 1970s, O’Keeffe began hiring Lopez’s brothers to help Suazo with the garden; later, they’d be hired full-time and taught how to care for the garden to the artist’s liking. Decades later, in 2006, when the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum took over the Abiquiú property and decided to bring the garden back to its former glory, the Lopez family was essential to the process.

“They had the knowledge,” Lopez explained, referring to her brothers Margarito, who is now the gardener, and Belarmino, who is the construction and maintenance specialist. “Of course there’s always new ways of doing things, but we also want to maintain some of the old history of how things were done when Georgia O’Keeffe was at her house, to maintain the authenticity and her aesthetic. It’s a very contemplative place.” That history includes watering the plants through the original flood irrigation system, where the area is flooded “almost like a rice paddy,” Lopez explained, so that even the deepest soil absorbs the moisture.

“Ms. O’Keeffe herself would start her vegetable garden as early as February, planting her peas,” Lopez explained, “and we follow basically the same procedure she did, but the things that are grown in the garden today may not necessarily have been around at the time that she was still here with us.” Among the crops there today are tomatoes, squash, corn, beans, kale, eggplant, berries, and herbs. But the growing season starts later, to coincide with a dynamic summer internship program—a collaboration between the museum and the Santa Fe Botanical Garden—that brings students from local high schools to the garden to help with planting and harvesting the produce. (The two institutions also teamed up with two local high schools to create a livestream of the garden online.)

This summer, a dozen students worked with Margarito to learn the ins-and-outs of organic gardening, and about O’Keeffe herself. “She didn’t like to use pesticides, and that’s exactly what the students are learning now,” Lopez offered; they’re working on natural repellents to keep critters from eating the tomatoes, squash, and zucchini. At the end of the season, the students harvest the garden and take home their share; the rest is delivered to a local food bank.

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Abiquiú Garden Project Interns, 2016. Photo by Micaela Butts. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Lopez suggested that the artist’s interest in the garden traces back to her upbringing on a farm in Wisconsin, as well as the summers she spent in Lake George with her partner Alfred Stieglitz (there are photographs of her there, pruning fruit trees). Though she did get her hands dirty from time to time (as photographs verify), O’Keeffe was enamored with the way the garden nourished her. Later in life, as she lost her vision due to macular degeneration, she had a small path built into the center of the garden so that she wouldn’t accidentally tread on the plants, and could walk out and enjoy it alone.

“She liked seeing things grow and coming out of the ground,” Lopez explained. “She liked to bring the outdoors in.”

Inside the Abiquiú house today, various potted plants are the ones that belonged to O’Keeffe—including a geranium and an aloe plant in the kitchen, a fern in the dining room, and an iron plant in the sitting room. “Those were here when she was still alive,” Lopez reflected. “They’re part of her and part of her history. They’re as important as everything else.”

Casey Lesser is Artsy’s Creativity Editor.

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These Low-Tech Indoor Gardens Bring Vegetables To Your Kitchen

• 06.29.18
• WORLD CHANGING IDEAS

These Low-Tech Indoor Gardens Bring Vegetables To Your Kitchen

Aggressively Organic wants to improve diets (and fight food insecurity) by making growing your own produce as simple as possible.

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[Photo: Aggressively Organic]

BY ADELE PETERS

While some indoor farming companies operate in sprawling buildings–like Aerofarms, with a 70,000-square foot, tech-filled farm inside a former steel millin Newark, New Jersey–a small startup called Aggressively Organic is focused on increasing indoor farming one square foot at a time. The startup wants to make small kitchen gardens affordable enough to be accessible to everyone, growing kale or tomatoes that can begin to address food insecurity.

The company’s new kits, which will begin shipping to customers in August, come with seeds that someone can plant in a small pod made from coconut coir, a byproduct of making coconut water. After the plants sprout up, the pods get moved to small cardboard containers under lights that come with the system. The company claims that after the initial setup, the system holds in water well enough that it won’t need to be watered again for at least a month. It’s low-tech, unlike some similar systems with sensors that measure soil moisture and automatically water themselves.

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[Photo: Aggressively Organic]

“Typically hydroponic systems require pumps and air filters,” says Partlow. “Ours does not. It requires none of that. So that’s how you keep the cost down.” A set of nine hexagonal planters, which nestle together to save space on a counter or bookcase, along with all of the assorted parts of the system and 72 refills of the growth medium and seeds, is currently on pre-order at a sale price of $139; once the plants begin growing, they can be harvested continuously for months.

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[Photo: Aggressively Organic]

“We harvest off of a head of lettuce for three months or kale for us six months to a year,” says Partlow. (When leaves are taken off the plant, rather than cutting off the whole plant, the plant keeps growing.) Like an outdoor vegetable garden, it’s cheaper to use than buying organic produce at a grocery store, but because it’s inside, it can be used year-round in any climate. It’s also easier to maintain, uses less water, and doesn’t require the use of pesticides. The company believes that a network of its indoor gardens throughout households would also make the food system more resilient; rather than growing lettuce in drought-prone Arizona and California, where nearly all of it is grown today, it could be grown in the kitchens where it’s eaten.

Partlow aims to make the systems available to everyone, particularly those who are food insecure, though even a price of $139 may be out of reach of someone who relies on food stamps. The company is working on a new service model that would supply customers with a six-pack of plants that are already ready for harvest, and let them exchange the plants as many as 24 times a month, for a cost of around $50, which could be paid either in installments or through SNAP, the government food assistance program.

Growing food at home could also improve nutrition–both because fruits and vegetables lose nutrients as they spend time in long supply chains and because simply having kale visible on your counter may mean you eat more of it.

“What we found is that if it’s available and you don’t have to go to the store to get it, our diets start to resemble more of what our natural diets as human beings have always been, which is we graze,” says Partlow. “Our habits actually change… you eat more vegetables than you would now because it’s available. It takes less time to plant, grow and maintain these things than it takes most people to get dressed and get ready to go to the grocery store and find a parking spot.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world's largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley.

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Starbucks Offers “Grounds For Your Garden” From Local United Kingdom Stores

Starbucks Offers “Grounds For Your Garden” From Local Stores

Posted on 24 May 2018 by Ben Wood

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Starbucks has joined forces with The Allotments & Gardens Council UK to offer green-fingered gardeners the chance to pick up coffee grounds from their local store to use on their plants, as the grounds can help boost plant growth.

The “Grounds For Your Garden” scheme sees Starbucks stores across the UK donating bags of used coffee to customers, encouraging gardeners to use coffee waste as a natural fertilizer and help boost crop growth, in collaboration with The Allotments & Gardens Council UK, which is helping promote the idea to its members.

According to the Allotments & Gardens Council UK, coffee grounds provide a great long-term way to enrich the soil and eliminate the need for other fertilizers, and they can also speed up the composting process – making them the perfect natural material to use in private gardens, allotments, and outdoor spaces.

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The “Grounds For Your Garden” scheme is seen as an ideal way to reuse waste, as even the packaging is reused; baristas scoop used coffee grounds into the empty bags originally used to deliver espresso beans to stores. All customers need to do to get involved in the scheme is to pick up a free bag of used coffee grounds, which will be located by the check out in their local Starbucks store, or they can ask their barista.

Jeff Bond, a board member for The Allotments and Gardens and Council UK, commented: “Our members are always looking for new ways to boost their crop growth and this scheme really benefits gardeners in local communities who may not have access to this natural fertilizer. Used coffee grounds are high in nitrogen so they are fantastic for plant growth and we can use them for growing a range of plants on the allotments from, tomatoes to marrows and even pumpkins!”

Clare Walker, communications director for Starbucks UK, said: “Thank you to the Allotments and Gardens Council UK for shining a spotlight on this programme, which we have offered in our stores for 20 years. We’re committed to reducing waste from our stores, and it’s a great opportunity to support local gardeners and allotment keepers too!”

The Rise Of The Agrihood: Farmscape Helps Companies And Communities Grow Their Own

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The Rise Of The Agrihood: Farmscape Helps Companies And Communities Grow Their Own

Georgina Wilson-Powell

17 April 2018

Imagine, you come home from work, head out into the garden and pick your salad for supper. Or how about swinging past the neighbourhood urban farm at the weekend and pick some fruit for Sunday lunch.

Farmscape, California’s largest urban farm venture, has been building these kind of options for city-slickers and companies for over 10 years, but recently interest has exploded.

Let’s talk agrihoods.

An agrihood is a farm experience in the middle of a city. Think an urban farm meets a suburban community centre. It’s the new definition of a mixed use development, instead of a shared tennis court, there’s an orchard and growing space. 

“In America, when they started building stuff, the standard was to have everybody have a ton of lawn. Everyone has a front and back lawn, despite the fact that doesn’t really work. It works in certain environments; it definitely doesn’t work in California,” explains Lara Hermanson, the Principal at Farmscape.

Farmscape manage over 700 projects across California, of all shapes and sizes

“Then there would be a pool, a health club and a community centre that no one would really use and the homeowners’ association would be paying for that in perpetuity. What we propose is instead of building around that, is build the development around a farm where the residents, when they pay for the landscaping, also get fresh food.”

As we want to reduce our food miles and guarantee quality of our fresh produce, agrihoods have shot up in popularity. In 2014, Farmscape worked on one such project, it now has 10 on the go.

“They’re very easy to get through city councils and there’s a lot of positive feedback from neighbours about them. It looks a lot prettier and more pastoral than big walls and very, almost corporate-looking landscaping. They’re a big hit,” says Hermanson.

This growing boom also coincides with a wider desire to be surrounded by more nature in our cities and a rise in a more plant based diet. An agrihood helps tick all those boxes.

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“A lot of work is done for us by the weather, by the soil”

How it works

Farmscape don’t just manage agrihoods for forward thinking tech bros in Silicon Valley. 

Their clients range from residential growers looking for help to create a versatile, permaculture inspired back garden or tiny veg beds on rooftop gardens, to restaurant gardens and enormous plots of commercial land – Farmscape installed and now manage an edible garden at the Levi’s Stadium in LA for instance. They advise, build and manage the spaces or help you manage it, so that everyone gets consistent, colourful, Californian food.

They have over 700 projects across California, growing food for Fortune 500 companies, Michelin-starred chefs and World Series champions. Farmscape have it down to a fine art and won’t accept every new location as a potential growing space.

“We say no to as many projects as we say yes to, because we know they won’t be very viable. We don’t want to give somebody a garden where they’re going to have to be constantly fighting nature. For instance, if you have a bunch of 40ft trees encircling your very small backyard, we’re not going to take your project on, because the trees are habitat for birds and wildlife, the tree roots will invade the garden and cast a lot of shade,” says Hermanson.

While keen gardeners are inundated with online information about how and when to grow crops, there’s nothing like having a local expert on hand and Farmscape hold clients’ hands so they become confident in how to grow their own fruit and veg.

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Californians love their tomatoes, heritage crops and micro greens says Hermanson

Getting growing

“There’s no better place in the world for growing food," says Hermanson. "There’s a reason Napa and Sonoma are famous food areas and why restaurants in San Francisco are so good. A lot of work is done for us by the weather, by the soil. Our climate is so fantastic."

Farmscape help clients grow salad greens, tomatoes, tiny root crops like radishes and colourful carrots – anything that will grow in small raised bed.

“Everyone’s favourite is tomatoes. Tomatoes are the big year-in, year-out,” says Hermanson.

The service also advises on heritage crops, which have grown in popularity over the last few years. These crops are a little more finicky about where and when they grow so they advise mixing a few heritage crops with more ‘work-horse’ crops.

"Similarly, we have some regular green beans and some heirloom beans, so you get some interesting ones but you’re still going to get enough so you feel like you’ve got your money’s worth," she says.

With a huge rise in plant based eating – another California food trend that’s gone global – Farmscape’s managed plots slot in perfectly for time-poor, health-conscious, eco-aware Californians who want to know their food is local.

“Our ethos is very much wrapped up in plant-based diets and that’s the principle people want to pass onto their children. This sort of backyard growing focuses on seasonal ingredients and helping plant-based diets,” she says.

So time you want to explore the 'hoods of LA or San Francisco, head down to an agri-hood and find the green soul of California.

South Bronx Social Entrepreneur Henry Obispo Creates a Green Revolution and Sustainable Design, in Collaboration With Suny Farmingdale Students, for BORN JUICE

South Bronx Social Entrepreneur Henry Obispo Creates a Green Revolution and Sustainable Design, in Collaboration With Suny Farmingdale Students, for BORN JUICE

Born Juice is a plant-based Eatery and Juice bar coming this Summer

April 14, 2018  |  Source: Born Juice

South Bronx Social Entrepreneur Henry Obispo creates a Green Revolution and sustainable design, in collaboration with Suny Farmingdale Students, for BORN JUICE

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Mr. Henry Obispo

Volodymyr Zadorozhnyy (satorial studios)

NEW YORK, April 14, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Henry Obispo, a social entrepreneur who has set his future in building the first ever cold-pressed juice bar and plant-based eatery in the Bronx, NY with the help of SUNY Farmingdale Department of Urban Horticulture and Design.

Raised in the Bronx and born in the Dominican Republic, Henry Obispo is a product of a rich cultural topography, a community organizer, and an activist. 

Mr. Obispo wanted to take it upon himself to find solutions to the oppressive realities around health in his community, considered one of the largest food deserts and the poorest congressional district in the United States.

After implementing a grant from the USDA, where Mr. Obispo looked for solutions to the food desert realities, access to food became a focal point and an obsession for Henry to create solutions for those social ills. The passion that Mr. Obispo has for his community has prompted Mr. Obispo to dream big and start a business which will benefit everyone in the Bronx.

The 14 students led by Professor Stevie Famulari of Farmingdale Department of Urban Horticulture and Design started designing the space which can be found at 2500 Third Avenue in Mott Haven. Each of the students will design and develop a green concept integrating green technology to promote sustainability.

This space will soon become "Born Juice", a juice bar & Plant-based eatery in the Bronx, which will serve fresh pressed juices, smoothies, vegan bowls, and express casual healthy foods. We all know that juices cleanse the body and is a temporary break from eating solid foods. Fresh juices from fruits and vegetables nourishes the body and is another way of detox which can recharge, rejuvenate and renew the system. The Bronx community has been missing this very important factor in their daily lives. Mr. Obispo has seen this ongoing situation for decades and decided to fill in the blanks.

Mr. Obispo focuses on creating a hyperlocal system, where food is grown and harvested by local youth, used and produced in food served to the community by a local workforce, in the quest to reverse many of the health disparities in one of the largest food deserts in the country.

Mr. Obispo states, "We want a model where you have sustainability, and not just in the food. Everything will be from local gardens, local farmers, and hydroponics, and there will be sustainability in the interior designs, too.”

Born Juice is a revolutionary project because of its zero-carbon footprint model. Born Juice is expected to incorporate green technology in the form of hydroponic gardens to grow the food, which is later harvested for their cold-pressed juices and food.

This project will educate the local youth about urban farming and hyper-local systems to empower the local population riddled with health disparities and awaken them to a new green reality, operating in their own neighborhood.

To learn more about the Born Juice project, please visit: http://www.bornjuice.com/

Contact Info:
Contact Name: Henry Obispo
Born Juice
2500 3rd Ave, Bronx
NY10454
www.bornjuice.com
info@bornjuice.com
Instagram: @bornjuice

Canada: A Garden On Every Corner

Canada: A Garden On Every Corner

Linked by Michael Levenston

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Broadway and MacDonald.

In Vancouver, British Columbia, one social enterprise looks to make the most of unused urban space by converting empty lots into temporary community gardens.

By Chris Reid
Vancouver Community Garden Builders
Mar 27, 2018

There used to be a gas station at the corner of Cambie and 16th Avenue in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Today the site hosts 100 raised garden beds and provides growing space for roughly the same number of gardeners, many of whom are families living in nearby apartments and condominiums.

The project is the result of a partnership between Wesgroup, a local developer, and Vancouver Community Garden Builders, a local social enterprise. Together the pair opened six new gardens in 2017, which equals 600 new garden beds. In total, VCGB manages eight projects with close to 800 beds or 16,000 square feet of urban growing space.

In a city like Vancouver, where wait lists for permanent community gardens can reach into the hundreds, projects like the one at Cambie and 16th are a useful stopgap providing much needed opportunities for city dwellers to learn about and participate in their own food security. A single garden bed produces around 10 pounds of yield in a year; multiply that by 100 and you’ve got a supermarket aisle full of locally grown, organic veggies.

The benefits of urban agriculture are well documented and innumerable. Beyond the nutritious food they grow, community gardens have been linked to increased social wellbeing in neighbourhoods, reduced crime rates and even less public litter. For many, they offer a retreat from the hectic, concrete urban landscape, and a simple way to recharge.

Cambie and 16th.

The results can be seen all across the city. Where once people came to fill up their tanks, green thumbs are now planting their first seeds of the year, hoping for an early spring. To learn more about the temporary community gardens.

4th and Macdonald Temporary Community Garden
Broadway and Victoria Temporary Community Garden
Dunbar and 39th Temporary Community Garden
Broadway and Alma Temporary Community Garden
Oak and 41st Temporary Community Garden
Cambie and 16th Temporary Community Garden

Visit www.communitygardenbuilders.com

When Farm-to-Table Comes To Your Own Front Yard

When Farm-to-Table Comes To Your Own Front Yard

By JENN HARRIS

MAR 14, 2018

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Kevin Meehan, chef-owner of Kali restaurant on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, in an urban garden located in the front yard of a home near his restaurant. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

"We're a farm-to-table restaurant."

Sound familiar? These words are part of the repertoire of greetings uttered by countless servers in Los Angeles and beyond.

If you've been paying attention, the term farm-to-table, which refers to the idea of showcasing farm produce on your menu — and was coined by this paper's own restaurant critic Jonathan Gold in a 2000 Gourmet article — is nothing new. In fact, it's been used to describe just about every notable restaurant opening in the last decade.

Garden-on-the-neighbor's-front-lawn-to-table? Now that's something a little different.

After operating a roaming pop-up dinner party series called Kali Dining, chef Kevin Meehan, who grew up in Long Island, N.Y., and has cooked at the Los Angeles restaurants L'Orangerie, Bastide and Citrine, opened Kali restaurant on Melrose Avenue in 2016. A little more than a year ago, he started knocking on the doors of the squat Craftsman houses that surround the Larchmont restaurant, determined to find a neighbor who would let him grow a garden on their front lawn.

"I decided to get weird," says Meehan on a recent afternoon, dressed in crisp chef's whites and a blue apron. "It's my dream as a chef to have a farm like Blue Hill at Stone Barns, but that's not going to happen in L.A. So I knocked on this one door and asked if I could beautify the front yard with a garden. The guy who answered was like, 'Nah, not interested, weirdo.' So I kept going."

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Kevin Meehan waters the plants in an urban garden located in the front yard of a home near his restaurant. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Meehan's luck changed on his sixth try, when he came to a dark gray, single-story house with white trim, bars on the windows and a white Mercedes in the driveway. "The guy who owns it just said, 'Hell yeah,'" says Meehan. "He wants no money. He won't even take money for the water. So I beautified his front yard. Boom."

What was a square lawn covered in drought-ridden grass is now a sprawling grid of nine 12-foot by 3-foot garden beds made of beautiful California redwood, collectively filled with about $1,500-worth of soil. It's like a small oasis, smack dab in the middle of the block.

Rosemary sprigs threaten to overtake one of the beds while red sorrel, mustard frills and arugula fill another. Oregano and Cuban oregano grow next to each other alongside a patch of salad burnet. The box full of dinosaur kale looks like it could supply bowls of salad at the restaurant for weeks. There's a section full of thyme, and just across a small walkway: sage, parsley and nasturtiums. And this is just the beginning.

And all that produce accentuates just about every dish on the menu: kale salad with crème fraîche; charred Hass avocado surrounded by garden greens; a burrata salad studded with mustard frills; yellowtail crudo zapped with peppery nasturtiums; cavatelli pasta served in a ring of crispy arugula.

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Violas grow in an urban garden located in the front yard of a home near Kali restaurant in Los Angeles. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Meehan gets what he plants from Jimmy Williams and his son Logan, who together run Logan's Garden. The father-and-son duo sell plants and fertilizer mix at the Sunday Hollywood and Wednesday Santa Monica farmers markets. They advise Meehan on the garden, encourage certain plants and give him tips on how to keep them thriving.

"I worked out this deal with them so they give me everything for free and we do a food trade," says Meehan. "They come in once a week for dinner and a bottle of wine and they give me $400 worth of stuff to plant."

In addition to venturing out into the neighborhood, Meehan asked the woman who runs a book binding shop next to the restaurant if he could put a garden bed outside her back door. The shop's owner, Charlene Matthews, said yes, and this is where Meehan mostly grows herbs and some arugula, in a single garden bed just steps from the restaurant.

"It's nice because it looks really good and I guess I steal a bit of arugula," says Matthews. "I was happy when they said they wanted to put the garden bed in. There should be gardens like this in more places."

Meehan's plan is to take over more front yards in the neighborhood, and he says he's not opposed to foraging in the area, deriving inspiration from his surroundings.

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Kevin Meehan plants mustard frills in an urban garden located in the front yard of a home near his restaurant. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

"I look at my commute from Culver City as one supermarket that's just waiting to get tapped into," says Meehan as he points out a lemon tree in a neighbor's backyard. "I tell my chefs when they park their cars to keep a lookout."

In the two years, he's been in this location, Meehan has picked lemons from that neighbor, loquats from another nearby house, cactus fruit from the house directly behind the restaurant — he uses it to make sorbet — and pink peppercorns from a nearby tree.

"I constantly put feelers out there on social media to see if people have fruit trees," says Meehan. "I tell them to bring them through, even if they aren't perfect, because we can make jams — and we'll hook them up with a free meal."

You could say the garden is a fluid extension of the chef's obsession with getting to the root of things — the building blocks that form his every dish.

A walk through the chef's kitchen reveals no less than 10 slow cookers full of black garlic, some of which have been fermenting for weeks. He'll turn that garlic into his own umami powder, which he uses to season dishes, dust plates of crudo and coat his fried chicken sandwiches. In the back of the kitchen, Meehan makes his own butter. He uses the buttermilk to make his own crème fraîche and bread. Jars of pickles line one wall of the small kitchen. And he makes his own yogurt too.

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Chef Kevin Meehan inside the kitchen of his restaurant, Kali. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Back in the garden, Meehan places a pizza box on the dirt next to one of the beds, kneels down on top of it, rolls up his sleeves, and prepares to switch out some of the lettuces.

Meehan persuaded another neighbor to let him use his front lawn. And at some point, he's hoping all the neighbors will say yes.

"There are so many benefits to this, and it helps me keep my cooks engaged and happy," says Meehan. "There's a real connection to the food and you don't want to waste anything because you can see what it took to grow it."

On his way back to the restaurant from the garden, Meehan spies a man a few houses down, who is out front watering his lawn. The chef quickly rushes over to him.

"Want to get weird?" Meehan asks.

Local chefs with dedicated gardens

Nyesha Arrington of Native restaurant in Santa Monica works with the Cook's Garden on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice. Gardener Geri Miller turned a vacant lot into the garden in 2013, and runs it with her team from Home Grown Edible Landscapes. Arrington is currently getting nasturtium and passion fruit from the garden. The Cook's Garden also works with Antonia Lofaso of Scopa Italian Roots, the Tasting Kitchen, Tender Greens, Wes Avila of Guerrilla Tacos, Michael Fiorelli of Love & Salt and Bruce Kalman of Union Restaurant.

Tony Esnault of Church & State and Spring restaurants, both in downtown L.A., works with the Community Garden on Industrial Street in the Arts District, located between Mateo and Mill streets. Residents of the Biscuit Lofts, where Church & State is located, launched the small garden (four garden beds) in 2009. Esnault's mother-in-law Shamsi Katebi maintains Esnault's two beds in the garden, as well as some planter boxes outside the restaurant's kitchen door. She also grows herbs in the flower pots that surround the restaurant's patio. At the community garden, Katebi is growing kale, Swiss chard, fennel, nasturtium, borage, lemon verbena, parsley, basil and cilantro. And in the planter boxes, she's growing herbs and edible flowers.

Gary Menes of Le Comptoir in Koreatown turned the front, back and side yards at his mother's Long Beach house into a garden last year. He grows everything in 1- and 5-gallon pots using compost and organic fertilizer. Menes says he purchases most of his seeds from Bakers Creek in Missouri, and is currently growing a market's-worth of produce including cipollini onions, four kinds of radishes, sprouting broccoli, two kinds of cauliflower, fava beans, English peas, potatoes, eggplant, garlic chives and more.

Timothy Hollingsworth of Otium in downtown L.A. worked with LA Urban Farms to plant a garden on the rooftop of his restaurant a couple of weeks before it opened in late 2015. There are 24 vertical pods on the rooftop used to grow sage, lettuce, kale, fennel fronds, borage, arugula, mustard frills, mustard greens and more. The restaurant chefs maintain the garden on a daily basis but the pods are on an automated system that waters the plants. And a team from LA Urban Farms comes out to check on the garden weekly.

Niki Nakayama of n/naka and her wife and sous chef Carole Lida-Nakayama planted a garden at their home in Los Angeles in 2006. Farmscape, an Eagle Rock-based company that helps manage gardens, maintains the garden, which grows on the front yard of the house. The Nakayamas grow Japanese vegetables including cucumbers, eggplant and herbs such as shiso for the restaurant.

Fernando Darin at Ray's & Stark Bar at LACMA recently rearranged the onsite garden, which was started at the restaurant in 2014. In the seven raised beds, Darin is growing arugula, mustard greens, sorrel, cilantro and edible flowers. The restaurant also has a compost program that turns organic food waste into soil used in the garden.

Arthur Gonzalez of Roe Seafood and Panxa Cocina works with Sasha Kanno, owner and operator of Farm Lot 59 in Long Beach to grow produce for his restaurants. Kanno created the 6-acre farm in 2010. She and Gonzalez are currently growing fennel, carrots, huacatay, lavender, kale, serrano peppers, jalapeño peppers and tomatoes for the restaurants.

info@kalirestaurant.com

Jenn.Harris@latimes.com

@Jenn_Harris_

Return Of The Good Life: The New Craze For Front Garden Allotments

Return Of The Good Life: The New Craze For Front Garden Allotments

Karin Goodwin

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Mandatory Credit: Photo by REX/Shutterstock (5532309a).MODEL RELEASED Smiling woman gardening in vegetable patch.VARIOUS.

FORGET neatly trimmed hedges, tidy rows of begonias and well-tended lawns. An increasing number of 21st-century growers in Scotland claim it's time to rebel against the short back and sides approach traditionally taken to front gardening in towns and cities and start making use of them as practical – but beautiful – allotments for growing fruit and veg.

With growing space at a premium – especially in cities – and waiting lists of nearly ten years for allotments in Glasgow and Edinburgh, there is a growing trend to turn front gardens into "quirky and fun" allotments allowing keen gardeners to grow edible plants that look good and feed the family.

Mat Coward, an independent garden writer whose new book is titled Eat Your Front Garden, said that it was time to throw off the "bourgeois" credentials of tidiness and conformity. While front garden vegetable growing might trigger images of the Good Life – the 1970s BBC sitcom about Tom and Barbara Good's attempt at self-sufficiency – or bring to mind Second World War Dig for Victory campaigns, Coward said he and others were advocating a modern approach to making the best use of available growing space.

"The idea of “respectable” changes with every generation," said Coward. "Perhaps your grandparents would walk by a front garden of millimeter-trimmed, bright green lawn, surrounded by precisely equidistant bedding plants, and nod with approval. You, on the other hand, might walk by a front garden clearly arranged to attract bees and birds, and similarly feel 'this householder adheres to the current consensus view of good values'."

He claimed that a combination of our society's reliance on cars, combined with austerity policies forcing longer working hours meant many time-poor families opted to pave their front gardens as a low maintenance option. Coward said there was a growing feeling that growing your own fruit and veg in your front garden was a "small way of repairing the environment".

There is, however, a worry that turning your front garden into an allotment might upset neighbors and make growers the talk of the street if a potato patch suddenly appeared where a lawn once was. However, Coward said: "My book puts forward the idea of the 'Invisible Allotment'." He has collected a list of more than 30 plants which can be grown for food which don't look like crops, including Caucasian spinach and bamboo. "Sometimes they are edibles in their countries of origin which we’ve adopted as ornamentals, some of them are traditionally used as edibles, but you wouldn’t know it by looking. My main criterion is that these are plants you can grow openly out front without anyone raising an eyebrow."

He claimed other reasons for not wanting your front garden to look like an allotment include fear that your produce will be pinched and being forbidden to grow vegetables by landlords if renting. "It fools both the busybodies and the burglars," he added.

Abi Mordin, founder, and director of Propagate, Glasgow-based growers collective, said:"It's quirky and it's fun. It's amazing what you can grow in a small space especially if you use permaculture methods such as polycultures [where you grow multiple crops in the same space] rather than growing in traditional rows." Other techniques to make the most of a small space include stacking up raised beds or containers or creating "micro forest" gardens, which are the conditions provided by forest "layers".

She admitted that while front garden growing did not provide enough space for people to be self-sufficient – it is estimated about an acre is needed – it could make grow-your-own more visible and popularise the trend. "Most people in the workshops that I run have no ideas what you can grow in this country, which is considerable. So at the very least, this opens people's eyes to what is possible."

Paula McCabe, the urban grower at the Concrete Garden, a community garden in Possil in Glasgow, claimed she had seen a huge increase in enthusiasm for garden growing through the projects she runs. She said: "Most people who come along tell us it has a real impact on their wellbeing. People make new friends, get fresh air, fresh produce, exercise, connection to nature, new skills, knowledge, and confidence. It's so therapeutic for so many reasons.

"Whilst there's so much that can be done in small urban spaces it can be hard to know where to start and people can be put off by the idea that it will take a big investment of time or money. Sometimes all people need is a little inspiration and guidance. We run a short course about container gardening in small spaces and on a budget to help folk turn unlikely spaces into attractive and productive growing spaces.

"It's absolutely possible to use the unlikeliest of spaces for food growing. All you need is an area that gets some sunlight and something to grow in."

She advised using raised beds and containers to make sure of good quality compost and topsoil, with simple "crops" like 'cut and come again' salad leaves perfect for window boxes. Veg crates can be repurposed to grow leafy greens and baby vegs such as carrots, beetroot or turnip, she added, while using a trellis to grow peas and beans vertically also helps make the most of a very small space. However, she and others warned against gardening near a busy road. "It would be wise to have a barrier from pollution," she added.

FIVE PLANTS FOR YOUR FRONT GARDEN

Here are Mat Coward's tips for plants for your front garden allotment that won't have the curtains twitching.

1. Chinese yam: with large, nutritious tubers it also produces scented flowers which give it the alternative common name of Cinnamon Vine.

2. Sunflower: the buds can be steamed and served with butter, like artichokes.

3. Bamboo: get a variety bred specially for production of bamboo shoots, as seen in Chinese takeaways, which are also amongst the most ornamental bamboos.

4. Caucasian spinach: used as an ornamental climber in the 19th century, now becoming better known for its edible greens and spring shoots.

5. Fuchsia: the epitome of front garden respectability but with juicy, sweet fruits and edible flowers.

FIVE TOP TIPS FOR FRONT GARDEN ALLOTMENTS

1. Window boxes filled with strawberries can look pretty and a provide summer fruit on the cheap. Ask community gardens if they have plants to spare.

2. Create a kitchen garden by growing fruit and veg together in raised or stacked beds. Edible flowers like Calendula and Nasturtiums look pretty and are a natural pest deterrent.

3. Make a herb spiral - it's an efficient way to grow lots of herbs in a small space and creates an attractive visual feature.

4. If you've got the space fruit trees like plums are a great option for combining good looks with practicality.

5. Plant bee friendly flowers like lavender and buddleia to attract wildlife to your garden and help pollinate fruit.

MOVES TO TACKLE 10 YEAR ALLOTMENT WAITING LISTS

NEW guidance due to be published in coming weeks will put a duty on local authorities to make better provision for growing spaces including allotments as part of the Community Empowerment Act, according to campaigners.

Campaigner Judy Wilkinson, a member of both the Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society and the Glasgow Allotments Forum, said that with waits of up to almost a decade on the most desirable allotments, the guidance was welcome news for those demanding improved access to growing spaces.

Under the guidance, which has yet to be enacted, local authorities will have to ensure waiting lists on allotments are no longer than five years and do not exceed 50 percent of the number of available plots. It is claimed that better use could be made of derelict land in urban areas to help meet demand for community growing spaces.

"The Community Empowerment Act will hopefully put pressure on local authorities [to improve access]," said Wilkinson. "It's going to be important for us to work in partnership with local authorities.

"Allotments are holistic growing space. They are about growing food but also about health and well being. It can be an escape place, it's about the individual, about family and about community. Lots of community gardeners spend a lot of their time there particularly in the summer and spring months."

She also said the change would help those in flats and high rises who don't have gardens.

But Abi Mordin, founder, and director of community growing organization Propagate claimed that it was necessary to do more than simply increase access to allotments in order to tackle the need for a local and sustainable growing strategy.

She is currently working with 25 local growers who are hoping to make use of the Community Empowerment Act to create urban market garden plots on derelict land in Glasgow. Propagate has already identified 15 local cafes and businesses keen to make use of their produce. "It ties in with land reform and asset transfer," she added. "It also feeds into the national movement of [creating] sustainable food cities. We are working collectively with local communities to create local economies."

hello@propagate.org.uk

Plant-Loving Millennials At Home And At Work

Plant-Loving Millennials At Home And At Work

By CAROLINE BIGGS  |  MARCH 9, 2018

SLIDE SHOW  |  12 Photos

Credit Brad Dickson for The New York Times

When Summer Rayne Oakes’s roommate moved out of their apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she was left with more than just a vacant bedroom.

“All of a sudden the apartment felt so cold and empty,” said Ms. Oakes, 33. “I needed to find a way to make the space feel warm and full of life again.”

Her solution? A fiddle leaf fig tree; the first of nearly 700 houseplants — spanning 400 species — that Ms. Oakes, founder of Homestead Brooklyn, would eventually buy for her 1,200-square-foot apartment.

Her indoor forest features everything from a subirrigated living wall in her bedroom, which is a wall of greenery that is essentially a self-watering planter with a built-in reservoir; a vertical garden made out of Mason jars mounted to the living-room wall with wooden boards and hose clamps; and a closet-turned-kitchen grow garden with edible plants (ranging from herbs and greens to pineapple plants and curry leaves).

“I didn’t set out to build a jungle,” Ms. Oakes said. “I just saw how much energy and life the plants brought to the space and kept going.”

It’s a sentiment that more and more young people seem to be echoing in their own apartments. Wellness-mindedmillennials, especially ones in large urban environments that lack natural greenery, are opting to fill their voids — both decorative and emotional — with houseplants.

“Millennials were responsible for 31 percent of houseplant sales in 2016,” according to Ian Baldwin, a business adviser for the gardening industry. The 2016 National Gardening survey found that of the six million Americans who took up gardening that year, five million were ages 18 to 34. “This group has more college debt and as a result, are renting homes instead of buying,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Houseplants are a low-cost way to have a green space at home.”

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Summer Rayne Oakes has created a vertical garden in her dining room that is made out of Mason jars mounted to the wall with wooden boards and hose clamps.CreditBrad Dickson for The New York Times

Meanwhile, Greenery NYC, a botanic design company, has increased its clientele by 6,500 percent since it was founded in 2010; developers are finding ways to include gardens as an amenity for residents, and more people — like Ms. Oakes — are turning what little spare space they have in their apartments into indoor gardens.

“Our sales have doubled each year,” said Rebecca Bullene, the founder of Greenery NYC. “And I attribute that mostly to businesses that want to attract millennial talent and millennials themselves who want more nature in their lives.”

Inside her 1,800-square-foot apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Ms. Bullene, 37, cares for over a hundred plants. She has installed a green divider wall — a six-foot-by-six-foot steel shelving unit filled with a dozen wooden planter boxes and over 50 plants — that separates her living room from her in-home office, as well as a terrarium and several other large-scale plants, including an 11-foot-tall Ficus Audrey tree, to help break up the open layout of the space.

But for Ms. Bullene, the plants do more than help define the apartment; they make her home healthier, too. “Plants boost serotonin levels and dissolve volatile airborne chemicals,” she said. “They actually make healthier spaces for humans to inhabit.” She cited a 2010 study from Washington State University that breaks down the benefits of indoor plants, including cleaner air and lowered stress levels.

Along with her floor-to-ceiling plant divider wall in the living room, she also employed a combination of plants that release oxygen at night in her bedroom — including aloe vera and sansevieria — so that she and her husband can breathe cleaner air while they sleep.

Millennial-minded companies are also going to great lengths to integrate greenery into their offices.

The Etsy headquarters in Dumbo, Brooklyn, for example, could easily be mistaken for an indoor botanical garden. Spanning nine floors and over 200,000 square feet, the office is home to more than 11,000 plants, including dozens of large-scale plant displays and living walls installed and maintained by Ms. Bullene and Greenery NYC.

“Every employee has a sight line to greenery,” said Hilary Young, Etsy’s sustainability manager, who helps the company seek ways to conserve the environment. “It’s a beautiful space that inspires and boosts productivity.” Greenery NYC and the architects at Gensler worked closely to create a state-of-the-art rainwater-harvesting and irrigation system at Etsy’s headquarters, which is considered the largest commercial “living building” in the world. It allows all the office plants to be watered with recycled stormwater.

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A line of cascading vines frames a conference room at the TED Talks headquarters in TriBeCa. CreditBrad Dickson for The New York Times

The roofs of the headquarters and a few of the neighboring buildings are outfitted with large gutters that collect and distribute rainwater to a 7,300-gallon cistern on the eighth floor of the Etsy building. From there, the water is dispersed through tubes to each floor of the building to water the plants.

“We wanted a space that bettered the lives of our employees,” Ms. Young said, “and that made a social and environmental impact outside of the office.”

And at the TED Talks headquarters in TriBeCa, Greenery NYC installed a series of unique plant displays throughout the two-floor office. Along with over 25 linear feet of boxed planters in the entrance lobby, the 50,000-square-foot office is filled with cascading vines, wall-mounted shelf planters, green dividers, and even desks outfitted with built-in planters, ensuring employees unlimited opportunities to take in a bit of nature throughout the workday.

“I love that when I look up from my work, all I see is green,” said Katie Hawley, 28, a senior editor at Etsy, who also keeps houseplants at home. “I feel happier just looking at them.”

With the increasing number of young people searching for access to greenery in their residences, real estate developers have also jumped on the trend.

At the ARC in Long Island City — a new 428-unit “industrial-inspired” luxury rental building developed by the Lightstone Group — residents have access to a 1,100-square-foot glass greenhouse, where they are free to plant and grow their own vegetables and herbs. “It’s been a tremendous selling point to prospective tenants,” said Scott Avram, senior vice president of development at Lightstone.

“One factor of my decision to rent in the ARC was the beautiful courtyard and greenhouse,” said Greg Garunov, 33. “There is something to having a green oasis at your fingertips in the steel city of New York.”

And over at the Margo, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, residents enjoy a living wall in the lobby as well as a rooftop garden with plots that tenants can adopt for their own gardens.

 

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“Wellness is a priority for our millennial-aged residents,” said Dave Maundrell, executive vice president of new developments for Brooklyn and Queens at Citi Habitats. “They’re willing to pay more for access to a green space.”

But for those young urbanites who don’t have the luxury of a communal garden or greenhouse, houseplants remain an affordable, and renter-friendly option.

For instance, Ms. Oakes has managed to make the bulk of her indoor garden self-regulating and, perhaps more impressively, removable.

Thanks to several DIY irrigation systems she hacked throughout her home, including two irrigation units she created using a 150-foot hose that connects to pipes under her kitchen sink, Ms. Oakes said she has to spend only about a half-hour a day tending to her plants.

And to avoid leaks to the apartment below, Ms. Oakes reinforced her bedroom wall with plywood and then added metal gutters to collect any excess water before hanging up her vertical garden.

Ms. Bullene, a renter, also took care to ensure that all of her subirrigated plant systems — even the self-regulating terrarium and self-watering plant wall — are removable.

“All of the plant systems can come with us if we ever move,” Ms. Bullene said. “It’s as easy as unplugging them and removing a couple of screws.”

Ms. Oakes said that even though plant care might seem like a whole lot of work, the effort is worth it.

“New York City is tough,” she said. “My plants gave me a sanctuary to come home to.”

Transforming Germany’s Cities Into Organic Food Gardens

Transforming Germany’s Cities Into Organic Food Gardens

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2/22/201 |  FreshPlaza

With ever more people living in urban centers, food security and quality is becoming a pressing issue. In Germany, cities are increasingly taking the production of organic products to a hyperlocal level.

As part of Biostädte (‘organic cities’), now Nuremberg joins a network of municipalities across Germany -including Munich, Bremen and Karlsruhe- working to make food production healthier and more sustainable.

In other cities like Berlin, Cologne and Kiel, urban and community-supported agriculture is introduced, which includes the greening of new buildings and the transformation of uncontaminated industrial land into community gardens. Their plans also foresee car-free, solar-powered districts where edible plants grow on and around buildings.

Citizens are being encouraged to cultivate useful crops, using public green areas in their neighborhoods to plant rows of potato plants or fruit trees. In doing so, they alleviate the municipal taxes, as this costs less than designing and maintaining the public green spaces.

According to an article by dw.com, these urban agricultural spaces are intended to become focal points where food is produced, processed and traded.

Peek Preview of Hubitus Urban Sustainability Hub in Israel

Peek Preview of Hubitus Urban Sustainability Hub in Israel

Hubitus at the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens will be a zero-energy hub with smart water and solar collection systems, built from recycled containers.

By Abigail Klein Leichman  FEBRUARY 5, 2018

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Hubitus - the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens Hub for Urban Sustainability. Simulation by Sharon Golan

The architectural plans are completed for Hubitus – the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens Hub for Urban Sustainability, and it’s easy to see why the co-founders are fielding inquiries from botanical gardens all over the US and Canada.

“We took the entrepreneurship hub model from the startup world and adapted it to the environmental world. This is something that has never been done before, definitely not at a botanical garden,” says co-founder and director Lior Gottesman.

She and co-founder Adi Bar-Yoseph have described Hubitus, a unique co-working space for environmental entrepreneurs, environmental artists and designers, urban planners, social activists, gardeners and urban farmers, at international conferences in Hawaii, Miami, San Diego and St. Louis.

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Open classrooms at Hubitus – the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens Hub for Urban Sustainability. Simulation by Sharon Golan

Recently they accepted invitations from the heads of the Chicago Botanical Gardens and the UC Davis Botanical Gardens in California.

“We are invited to talk all over the world as botanical gardens rethink their social role,” Gottesman tells ISRAEL21c. “We’ve taken it to the next level by having change agents sitting in the garden. We’re the startup nation so it’s clear this innovation will come from here.”

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Hubitus – the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens Hub for Urban Sustainability. Simulation by Sharon Golan

Hubitus already exists virtually for the past three years, providing courses, training, events and professional connections to 80 change agents. The hub also runs outreach programs including an initiative to establish sustainable gardens in preschools.

The physical space to house 30 Hubitus members was planned with the input of that community in coordination with Noam Austerlitz, a prominent Israeli “green” architect and lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s schools of architecture and environmental studies.

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Office of Hubitus – the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens Hub for Urban Sustainability. Simulation by Sharon Golan

The zero-energy hub will generate as much renewable energy as it uses, aided by intelligent water collection and solar energy systems. “It will be built entirely of recycled containers using green construction techniques,” says Gottesman.

“In addition to the workspaces, our hub also will have classrooms, open spaces, rooftop gardens, green walls and more because our community needs places to prove and demonstrate concepts in areas such as beekeeping, hydroponics and vertical gardening.”

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Closed classroom at Hubitus – the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens Hub for Urban Sustainability. Simulation by Sharon Golan

The grading of the site has started, with funding from Leichtag Foundation, and further fundraising is being conducted through JNF Australia and the Jerusalem Foundation. In addition to Austerlitz Architecture, the hub has engaged the services of Shlomo Aronson Architects for landscape design.

How A School Kitchen Garden Can Transform An Entire Community

2018

How A School Kitchen Garden Can Transform An Entire Community

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A school initiative is encouraging whole multicultural communities to improve their relationship with food. (Sunshine North Primary School)

"They say food brings people together. What we’ve found is that this program has brought our community together."

By Yasmin Noone

29 JAN 2018

There’s a small kitchen garden situated in the cultural melting pot of Sunshine North in Melbourne’s west that’s changing the way the community interacts with food.

It’s not in a local park or in an expensive gardening centre tended to by masses of horticulturists.

No. This edible garden of influence – cared for by children, teachers and parents – is located on the grounds of the low-socioeconomic, multicultural Sunshine North Primary School.  

The kitchen garden at this school, operating as part of the nationwide Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation, goes one step further than educating kids about plants and food.

It aims to help a very diverse group of students to read and write, and encourages parents - many of whom are newly arrived migrants - to integrate into Australian society.

“We are a very multicultural community,” Sunshine North Primary School principal, Ken Ryan, tells SBS Food. 

“There are 300 children at the school and 35 different nationalities here. We have a very big Vietnamese community and the second largest community is from Burma. 

“For many of our students, they start at our school at the beginning of their life in Australia. But the thing is, only one-in-10 students speak English at home. So the starting point for the children’s formal education when they come here is usually quite low.”

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School kitchen gardens aren’t just about kids dipping their fingers in the soil.

The school, which became involved in the kitchen garden program around 11 years ago, has developed the program into something extra special. The teachers have integrated kitchen garden lessons into the school curriculum, which incorporates science, math, critical thinking and English.

The recipes are used to teach children and their parents basic reading, comprehension and maths, while science lessons are conducted in the garden.

Conversational English skills are practiced while children are eating their cooked lunch. As they sit together around a table – that they set – kids discuss the experience of cooking and chat about what the food tasted like. 

Students from kindergarten through to Year six participate in gardening and cooking classes, utilizing 80 percent of school-grown produce as they prepare meals (with teacher supervision) in the school kitchen. 

Community-wide benefits

The program has also helped parents from non-English speaking backgrounds who haven’t felt confident volunteering for academic-based activities at the school.

They get involved with Sunshine North Primary community by lending a hand in the garden.

“Everyone cooks and everyone eats, no matter what language you speak, so we engaged the parents in the garden and in the kitchen,” says Ryan

“Parents now come into the school and look after the garden or feed the chickens. The program is the result of a whole community effort.

“They say food brings people together. What we’ve found is that this program has brought our community together.”

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aims to help a very diverse group of students to read and write, and encourages parents to integrate into Australian society.

A healthy lesson for all ages

Ryan explains that the kitchen garden – consisting of seasonal herbs, fruits and vegetables – is also teaching parents and children about health and wellbeing, and on the dangers of fast food in Western society.

“It used to kill me to watch some parents coming into the school, with a McDonald's meal for their child at 10 am which they wanted to be served to them for lunch at 1 pm, thinking they were doing the right thing.

“I thought, ‘we need to change the learning around Western food and how important food is in general in a child’s wellbeing’. 

“We can now clearly see that at our school, this program helps both children and their parents to make good choices about their food.

“They are learning, [as a community] to grow their own food and understand that the food you grow yourself tastes different to the food you buy.”

1,630 kitchen gardens nationwide…and counting

Sunshine North Primary is only one of the many schools around Australia participating in the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation.

Since 2004, the program has been implemented in 1,630 primary schools, high schools and early learning centres nationwide. The program is among the most popular in primary schools – 1,065 primaries are involved – while 70 special schools and 237 early learning centres also participate.

The foundation reports that Victoria is by far its biggest supporter, with kitchen gardens now in almost 560 schools and centres across the state.

However, there are 48 kitchen gardens implemented in the Northern Territory, 59 in Tasmania, 71 in the ACT, 139 in South Australia, 213 in Queensland, 170 in WA and 377 in NSW.

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It's also about teaching immigrant parents and children about health and wellbeing, and on the dangers of fast food in Western society.

Why kitchen gardens create good food habits 

Rebecca Naylor, CEO of the Kitchen Garden Foundation and Program, attributes the program’s national popularity to its ethos – kitchen gardens teach children why eating well is important, what good food actually looks and tastes like, and where food comes from.  

“Kids habits are formed early in life,” says Naylor.

“If we can build habits for kids early on, that help them engage with growing food, cooking that food, eating seasonal fresh delicious food and then sharing that with others, then their relationship with food will be different than if they were never exposed to that experience.”

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Since 2004, the program has been implemented in 1630 primary schools, high schools and early learning centres nationwide.

Naylor explains that when kids are involved in the program their willingness to try new foods also increases.

“Many kids don’t necessarily know where food comes from so their experience of food is shopping in the supermarket – not putting a seed in the ground and growing a pumpkin or beetroot. 

“We know, even for us as adults, many of us have a fairly distant relationship with our food. But if your experience of food, [early on] is going to school, putting a seed in the ground and watching it grow in an environment where you also learn maths, English and language, then you are more likely to want to try that purple dip with the beetroot you’ve grown, as opposed to not wanting to try a meal put in front of you that you have no association with.” 

Evidence-based success 

The program is reaping positive education, community engagement, health and wellbeing results. A national evaluation of the program, funded by the Department of Health and Ageing and conducted between 2011-2012 by University of Wollongong researchers, found it to be a positive learning experience for students. Over 97.5 per cent of teachers involved also thought it benefited their student’s learning.

An earlier university study, done from 2007-2009, discovered that the program encouraged students to make positive health behaviour changes. These changes, the research showed, were then transferred to their home and community environments.

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The program is reaping positive education, community engagement, health and wellbeing results.

Barriers to access

The success of the kitchen gardens program begs one question: why doesn’t every school across Australia have a kitchen garden, run by this foundation or another?

Naylor says there’s often an assumption that schools might need a big space for a kitchen or garden to be involved. While this was once true, the program has been altered to adapt to the needs of any size school of any socio-economic standing. 

“To be fair, it’s true to say that schools that have a lower socioeconomic make-up often find it harder to get a program like this up and running because they have less of an ability to draw on the school community for fundraising – for example.”

However, Sunshine North Primary School got one running.

“It all comes down to the vision and leadership at a school. There needs to be someone involved in the school who has the ability to see how a program like this can be used right across the school community and curriculum.”

Naylor also calls on state governments to exercise leadership and encourage all schools of the value of kitchen garden programs for children of all backgrounds and wealth status.

“We need governments to say that running a kitchen garden of this type in your school is what they want to see happening. 

“It will give schools the permission they need to engage in the work that is required to set a program like this up.”

How do you provide tasty, delicious and high-quality meals, whilst keeping prices affordable? It’s a problem Shane Delia is facing both in his business and with his Feed the Mind project. The answer for Shane is to look for local solutions, and he enlists the help of Stephanie Alexander to supercharge the school garden as a means to provide healthy ingredients that don’t need to be ordered from the shop. Watch the episode on SBS On Demand here.

Shane Delia's Recipe For Life airs 8pm, Thursdays on SBS, then on SBS On-Demand. You can find the recipes and more features from the show here.