Restaurant Gardens are growing in popularity. As demand for fresh, organic, locally produced food increases, many chefs and restaurant owners now realize the quality and marketing benefits of growing their own ingredients. Contact us to help you develop an efficient, cost effective system for growing and harvesting your own top quality vegetables and herbs.
Restaurant gardens can be built on site, on a rooftop, surrounding an outdoor dining area, or adjacent to the parking lot. We can also create a garden off site, in a location nearby where more space is available.
Restaurant gardens can provide many benefits:
- A source of the freshest produce available
- Control over available crop varieties
- Staff retention: gardens help make work more engaging for restaurant staff
- Public Relation opportunities
- Exciting menu descriptions for diners
Contact us today to begin planning for and designing your restaurant food garden!
Seattle Urban Farm Company can work with you to design a productive restaurant farm that fits with your space, goals and budget. Gardens can take many forms, and the first step is to schedule an initial garden consultation to determine the ideal location, size and structure of your garden. We use our years of experience in urban farming and organic food production to create a garden design that works with your location, maximizes productivity, and is both fun and easy to work in.
Many restaurant sites present unique design and construction challenges. We can help you work through all of the details including safety concerns, access constraints, ongoing management and harvesting and crop selection.
Garden Types
Your Restaurant Garden site may need several hours, several days or several weeks of work to get ready for food production. To properly prepare the space, it might be necessary to remove existing plantings or build new raised beds. In other situations, you may choose to create a garden using a variety of different bed types. Below are examples of possible garden installations:
Cedar, Fir or Juniper Raised Beds: We can build just one raised bed or several dozen, depending on your budget and the space available. Wooden garden beds can be custom built to fit just right into your landscape. Common beds sizes (in feet): 4 x 4. 4 x 8. 4 x 10
Container Gardens: We can help you set up a functional garden from a wide variety of container types, helping you choose appropriate systems to work with your space restrictions, soil depth concerns and aesthetic of your space. Containers may range from 1 gallon to 50 gallons in size and many container gardens use a variety of sizes depending on the chosen crops and the space available.
Living Roof Systems: Existing living roofs or areas that are slated for living roof construction can be developed into productive food gardens.
Garden Maintenance
Regular and consistent attention is vital to keep a vegetable garden at the peak of productivity and beauty throughout the year. Our maintenance program is designed to help you manage your garden to maximize productivity and ensure crops are harvested at their peak. For those who are interested in learning to take care of the garden themselves, we always welcome you to join us during our maintenance visits.
We tailor our services to meet your needs, so you can choose from:
- An on-going, year-round program wherein we continually plant new successions of crops, manage soil fertility and pest or disease issues. Crops can be harvested by us or by restaurant staff.
- A bi-monthly or monthly program for those who want to do most of the work themselves.
- We also have a custom “you set the budget” program where you tell us how much you want to spend for the year, and we design a maintenance schedule around your budget.
For those of you who take care of your garden on your own but would like assistance with soil building and spring or fall garden preparations, we offer a “revitalization” service where we assess the current condition of your garden soil and use organic compost, soil amendments, and mulch to bring your soil health back to an optimum level.
Bastille Cafe and Bar
In the spring of 2009, we designed and built a rooftop garden at the Bastille restaurant in Ballard. We manage the raised beds year-round to provide the restaurant with a constant supply of vegetables and herbs. With our innovative greenhouse/shadehouse garden covers, we are able to grow top-quality salad greens and herbs in the heat of summer and in the dead of winter (as well as the spring and fall)!
The Bastille chefs give us a menu of crops they would like us to grow, and we set up a planting schedule to accommodate.
This year’s menu includes:
- Arugula
- Baby Head Lettuce
- Basil
- Bay Leaves
- Beets
- Bush Beans
- Cucumbers
- Fennel
- Miner’s Lettuce
- Mint
- Radishes
- Spinach
- Peppercress
- Tomatoes
If you would like to take a tour of the Bastille rooftop garden, please contact us or contact the restaurant directly. Tours are given regularly through the spring and summer every other Wednesday afternoon. Check the our Event Calendar or the Bastille website for dates and times.
Read About the Bastille Rooftop Garden:
“Restaurant Rooftop Gardens: Five of America’s Best” Gadling, June 15, 2012
“Five Food Events You Don’t Want To Miss” Seattle Magazine, June 23, 2011
“A Few Hardy Vegetables Can Make It Through Winter” The Seattle Times, November 6, 2010
“Bastille’s Rooftop Garden Raises Urban Farming to New Heights” Sunbreak, August 6, 2010
Top 10 Best Roof to Table Dining” Bon Appetit, April 2010
“At Seattle’s Bastille, the garden goodies are on the roof” Seattle Times, November 15, 2009
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