With the ever-unpredictable weather conditions in the UK, largely caused by climate change, we are starting to see colder, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers. The effect that this extreme weather has on British-grown produce can be detrimental, killing off crops and creating supply shortages.
With this in mind, people are increasingly starting to explore alternative options, with controlled growing environments like Urban Cultivators becoming more and more popular.
Here at Kitchen by Liquid, we’re always keen to keep on top of the latest trends and doing whatever we can to expand our offering for our food clients. That’s why we’ve recently partnered with Intelligence Appliances to have our very own Urban Cultivator installed – read on to find out more!
What is an Urban Cultivator?
Urban Cultivators are all-in-one indoor kitchen gardens that allow you to grow fresh herbs, microgreens, vegetables and flowers in optimal controlled environments.
The appliance carefully controls light, oxygen, temperature and humidity levels to ensure that crops get exactly what they need to grow and provide a healthy harvest. Essentially, they offer a simple process which allows anyone and everyone to grow fresh, nutritious vegetables or herbs in the comfort of their own kitchen.
For us, this means that our development chef, Olivier, can reduce the food miles of his dishes by growing fresh produce in our development kitchen – the very same place that they will be harvested and consumed.
Not only this, but it also means that we can expand our offering to our food and beverage clients. The herbs will be implemented into our product development, food styling and content creation offerings, meaning that clients can take full advantage of our freshly grown, organic produce.
What are we growing?
Our Urban Cultivators have the space for us to grow up to 16 different varieties at one time, so we’re spoilt for choice when it comes to deciding what to grow!
With different seeds taking different times to grow – anytime between one and five weeks – we’re able to use the growing space efficiently to make sure that we have a constant supply of fresh herbs for Olivier to use in his recipes.
To begin with, we are carefully nurturing seeds that will provide us with radishes, amber peas, coriander and rocket. We have also planted a nasturtium Alaska seed mix which we have been given exclusive early access to, with the official launch of the seed mix coming very soon.
We’re already seeing exciting progress, with lots of new shoots every day, but we can expect to see fully harvested radishes in one week, amber peas in two weeks and coriander, rocket and nasturtiums in three weeks.
We’ll be documenting our seed growth on our social media channels, so keep an eye out for their progress, as well as the delicious recipes that will be available once we have our first harvest!