Urban Cultivators at home and in the garden…

I started using an Urban Cultivator back in the kitchens in the hotel, because it was amazing to serve someone a dish where they’d been able to watch you hand-clip their greens seconds before they’d hit the plate. If you’re not already familiar with them, you should check them out- i’ll get into it more in future blogs but they’re essentially self contained hydroponic growing units that are super well thought out and make it easy to control the plants’ environment. Getting to harvest something and use it on the spot, so you know it still has all of its nutrient value intact because it’s so uber-fresh- that’s cool…

The flipside, though, is how I use them at home… now my kids go to it in the morning to get their greens for their smoothies, and thats awesome, lol, but so as much as we always have kale and wheatgrass and likes going on, the whole family also loves gardening (and eating out of the garden), so the boys have been hard at it starting seed plants in the Cultivator to transplant to get a jump start on the early season outside…

Turns out you can do tons of cucumber and basil plants in a single tray so I’ve been giving them away as fast as I can to all my neighbours…

Labours been relatively cheap though, so alls good.

These started from picking apart tiny micro basil plants with a teaspoon to transplant 😉

These are bell peppers and hot chilis are coming out of the cultivator in the next wave…

Cucumbers are a big deal around here because the kids go crazy for pickles.

So now they grow their own from cucumbers from seed and make pickle them themselves – everybody wins lol!!

So without further ado- here’s Micah’s recipe for pickles- (you may not have access to dried fennel flowers from the Domenica Fiore farm in Orvieto like he does, so in that case feel free to use fennel seed 🙂 )