The Roadhouse Spring Garden

A part of the sustainable foods program in The Schoolhouse is to grow own food as much as possible and use own ingredients in the restaurants. What could be more local that doing it yourself? This spring we are undertaking a project called The Roadhouse Spring Garden, which is basically the starting point of the sustainable foods program. The Roadhouse is one of the three restaurants this company has and it has a rather big garden well suitable for this kind project of growing own food. The garden plan has already been made, here it is:

So the garden will have three different kind of lettuce, rucola, cucumber, eggplant, spring onion, squash, two different kind of parsley, pink raddish, dill, rosemary, thyme, basil, oregano, cilanteo, spinach, beans and strawberries. So far, we have already planted spring onion and pink raddish, tomorrow we are supposed to implement the first plantings of lettuce and herbs. The idea is that not all the lettuce and rucola is planted simultaneously, but once in every two weeks or so. This way we can have a (almost) continuous supply of fresh lettuce - it really can't be preserved. So the fist planting should take place tomorrow, and then we'll have a few more planting times in every second week. Herbs on the other hand can be planted all at once, as they can easily be preserved by freezing or drying. Still, we are not going to plant them all the same time, because we first want to make sure they survive. Once the first ones start to successfully grow, we'll plant the rest of them. The actual gardening is done by an experienced local farmer Li Fengquan, who is the father of Li Haixin with whom I'm working on this project. It is great to have an experienced farmer with us, otherwise the chances of success would be rather small.

The first part of the project was to make a document of what seeds we have, when should they be planted and how. I found out different qualities they have in order to decide where to situate each species in the garden (e.g how much sun they need, what they look like, how tall they grow). That was actually fun, as it was really new to me - I haven't got any experience what so ever in gardening. Once this was done, we went to the site and made the plot plan. Here is the garden at the time we made the plan (only spring onien planted):

We decided that each plot should be devided by bamboo sticks and strings, and then a label should be put to each pot indicatating what is growing there, both in english and chinese, for customers to see. As mentioned earlier, we want to make the own food production/sustainable food a part of our product and market it to people. Here is the picture of the garden with bamboo stick on it (strings coming later):

We should have the first harvest in early summer, then we are going to serve homegrown vegetables and herbs in our restaurants! How great is that! We are planning with our executive chef Randhir how to use all the stuff we grow - what part used fresh, what dried, what freezed etc. - and how to put in on menu and deliver the information to customers. We should be starting the planning rather soon. But first we have to get the garden growing! Well, that's it for today about the garden. I am going to keep photo track of it, and I will keep you updated. Hopefully everything goes well and the plants survive!

Thanks for your interest!

Pietari