Catering

The Algarden Cafe got its first catering job. It was for a Regenerative Landscapes Conference at MIG, the design firm where I work when I'm not at the Algarden. It seem appropriate to have a local, organic lunch served at this sustainability talk with different City planners and officials worried about our future.

It was a new challenge for us having to serve at a different location and for 40 people. So we scanned the garden to see what we could harvest and serve for that many people.

The menu:

• Wilted Chard and Fava green salad
• Kale, leek and goat cheese tart

• Berkeley wild yeast sourdough
• Double mint iced tea

The lunch was a total success, people loved it and we had enough people to feed everybody.

This are my co-workers

A lot of people came to talk to me afterward and told me how much they loved the idea of having an actual hands on implementation to the planning strategies that they work on. There is a huge gap between planning and implementing, there are many constrains and blocks on the way, but any action as small as it might seem is a step on the right direction. And I do believe that liberating ourselves from the industrial food production is a simple step that we can all start to take. Stop buying food that came from across the world, or is extremely processed, meet your farmers, buy local (food and manufactured goods), plant something and develop a relationship with your plant. Plants are awesome beings and our existence depends on them so lets show some love and respect.

Since the beginning of April, and the lunches at the garden I started to keep track of the produce that was harvested from the garden. Keep in mind that the lot is only 1/8 of an acre.

Here's the breakdown for the month of April:

• A total of 101 pounds harvested
• 100 meals served

Basically a pound of produce per meal

What was harvested?

Kale, chard, collards, beets, horta (beet greens), lettuce, arugula, favas, lemons, sweet peas, Peruvian peppers, mustard greens, celery, radishes, herbs, strawberries, leeks, New Zeland spinach

Not included on that weight but also harvested from the garden animals:

honey & eggs