Urban Garden
On the heels of the Green Streets Party welcoming the prestigious Greenbuild Conference Tuesday night, the Downtown Tempe Community (DTC) in partnership with the Phoenix Permaculture Guild and Caffe Boa’s Chef Payton Curry, will be announcing the launch of Arizona’s first Urban Garden, extending Downtown Tempe’s role in community sustainability. The announcement will took place at Caffe Boa on Thursday, November 19 at 4:00 PM during a special reception featuring food items that represent products that may be grown in the garden. This Urban Garden will give Valley chefs and the community at large, access to locally grown, organic produce and ingredients to use in their culinary creations.
The location of the Urban Garden will be on 5th Street north of the City Hall Garage, which is the future home of a Marriott Hotel. Planting is scheduled to start in the next couple of weeks and the first products of the garden should be seen by mid-January. The Urban Garden continues the “Locavore Movement”, which is a collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies - one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place and is considered to be a part of the broader sustainability movement. This garden will play on this to bring communities together to benefit from eating fresh, locally grown food, which is not only healthier and environmentally-conscious, but tastes better too!
Caffe Boa’s celebrity chef, Payton Curry, is leading the charge for Valley chefs to get involved and use locally-grown ingredients on their menus. This idea fits perfectly with Chef Curry’s progressive “farm to table” cooking style that has grown in popularity in recent years. “The Tempe Urban Garden provides an opportunity for chefs to work together to cultivate exactly what we need to provide the freshest farm-to-table experience at our respective restaurants. For Caffe Boa, the garden project could not be a bigger asset as we have long been committed to the concept of sustainable dining and the community of Tempe." Local chefs will have access to the garden itself, while the general public can purchase products of the garden at the weekly Market on Mill, held on Thursday evenings in Downtown Tempe.
In collaboration with the landowners and the City of Tempe, a security gate and water supply will be provided to the garden. The Phoenix Permaculture Guild, whose mission of inspiring sustainable living through education, community involvement and creative cooperation, is providing volunteers to plant and maintain the herbs and produce that will be grown.
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