© Caron Golden, www.sandiegofoodstuff.com, 2010
Greenscaped Buildings, our partner that is installing, among other things, edible living walls at Mario Batali’s Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles and another at Urban Core, a non-profit in San Diego, passed along this link to a San Diego foodie blog.
Caron Golden, of “To Market, To Market, with San Diego Foodstuff”, visited Jim Mumford and took the opportunity to review his edible wall work (much thanks for her permission to reprint the section shown below):
The kitchen garden. It’s something those of us who cook at home hope to have just outside our kitchen door, accessible for quickly snipping a few sprigs of oregano, picking some lettuce leaves, or pulling a few radishes. But if you live in a condo or apartment you’re probably limited to a small balcony or terrace. And, if you’re a chef in the city, you may not even have that surrounding your restaurant.
Enter Jim Mumford, owner of the San Diego-based plant company Good Earth, and his edible walls, an idea so cool in concept that chef Mario Batali is his first restaurant customer (although he says that locally chef Bernard Guillas is ordering one for The Marine Room). According to Mumford, Batali wanted a roof garden at his restaurants Osteria Mozza and Pizzaria Mozza in Los Angeles, but couldn’t get it to work with the building specs. So, if he couldn’t go horizontal, how about vertical? After doing some research on his own, he found Mumford, who has been playing with the concept with several types of materials and styles.
… there are a couple of units that have dirt-filled modules covered with landscape fabric to keep the soil in when the wall is erect. Cut a slit into the fabric to plant each seedling, let the units rest horizontally while the plants root and grow, and then install them vertically.
That’s the process Batali’s wall is undergoing right now. His walls are eight inches thick, compared to the usual five inches. There are three units totalling 18 modules that when put together will create a wall 12 feet wide by six feet high and an opening on the top is allowing the planting of lettuces. No space goes to waste.
