Thanks to funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), an Agriculture & Environmental Innovation Centre team from Niagara College is spending the summer building a sustainable food garden for White Oaks, one of the College’s closest Niagara-on-the-Lake neighbours.
The project involves converting 1,152 square feet of property into a garden for food production to be used in White Oaks’ new restaurant, opening this August.
Grow Kitchen & Café will specialize in bringing together culinary art, education, wellness and the ultimate in nutrition, with a menu committed to and imagined on sustainability – primarily plant based – that is vibrant and minimally processed. The food will be rooted in health, innovation, local partnership and of course, amazingly delicious, according to White Oaks’ Kyle Payton, a Niagara-born chef who has returned to his roots to be creative consultant on Grow.
Niagara College horticulture professor Tanya Blankenburg is the project lead, while recent graduate Meghan Beattie and current student Mackenzie Haines are working daily on the project, researching and implementing the best methods of soil conditioning and plant care methods to develop a sustainable food garden.
You can follow their progress over the summer on social media, both through White Oaks (Instagram @white_oaks, Twitter @WhiteOaksResort, and Facebook) and through the SM channels of the college’s Research & Innovation division (Instagram @ncinnovation, Twitter @NiagaraResearch, and Facebook) Anyone wishing to snap a photo of the garden is asking to use the hashtag #growwithniagara to help us share the progress.
Mackenzie Haines, a summer student working on the White Oaks project for Niagara College’s Agriculture & Envinronment Innovation Centre, gets ready to talk about his experience in the early stages of the project. The garden is located on the west boulevard of White Oaks, on Taylor Road.
