Urban Farming

Our friend Indira Naidoo has a range of terrific, fresh recipes that I've been trying out this summer. Grow mignonette and red oak lettuce in your Glowpear, and either cultivate or purchase your favorite type of garlic to mix with the rest of the ingredients for this yummy summer salad.

I've been busy experimenting with microgreens from our friends at Farmwall, along with the produce from my Glowpear Café Planters. 

Check out this terrific salad mix that Farmwall suggests, something I've been tinkering with this spring:

Geert Hendrix and Serena Lee are not your typical farmers, yet they may be archetypes for agricultural professionals of the future. The pair devised the innovative start-up Farmwall, a small-scale indoor farm offering for restaurants and cafes that allows chefs to grow and harvest their own herbs and microgreens in a space the size of a bookcase.

Sometimes, you just want a simple dish to use all those more exotic herbs you're experimenting with in the garden.

We've been growing a lot of Asian varieties lately, so here's a quick one that's really tasty too!

Ellia Guy has always been most comfortable outdoors. That is possibly a legacy of spending most of her childhood playing outside climbing trees, exploring the myriad of creeks around where she grew up and in the garden. Ellia now runs Future Wild, a business that envisions our cities transformed into a verdant mosaic of native habitat patches and edible gardens. 

After spending several years studying and working in the Netherlands in incorporating sustainability into product innovation, Charity Teoh Buldt returned to Melbourne to start a family. With the busyness of juggling work and family commitments, sustainability can be hard to implement. A good start has been to expose her kids to edible gardens as early as possible, hence she chose to use Glowpear Urban Gardens.

Nashville is fast becoming a go-to food destination in the US, and Jamie Cunningham is at the forefront of the revolution. A leading light in the US coffee industry, Jamie Cunningham has nearly 10 years of experience developing commercial culinary ventures and programs for the Barista Guild of America. Jamie's latest venture is a restaurant, bar and coffee bean roastery,  Stay Golden Restaurant & Roastery, features a full-service restaurant complete with coffee and cocktail bar, an onsite coffee bean roastery, a private event space and hydroponic gardens.

Edible flowers. A topic people often brush-off as confusing, weird, too advanced or... just for the 'flower children of the 60s'. But nothing could be further from the truth, in fact, if you dabble in a bit of urban gardening, chances are you probably are already growing some. Most herbs and vegetables produce edible flowers at some point in their growth cycle. For the most part, the other varieties of edible flowers "grow like weeds" and provide a range of benefits to the average urban garden such as promoting plant growth, improving the taste of fruit, and attracting or repelling insects.

I love to keep indoor plants.  They make me feel happy and relaxed.  I keep them beside the TV and sofa, in the kitchen, bathroom, and in the office at work... everywhere.  I love the colour, shapes and texture plants bring to my home, but aesthetics aside, when it comes to the benefits of filling your space with greenery, these are just the tip of the iceberg.