Dining Option’s Off the Wall

0

Diners at the House of Blues could soon be eating food off the wall – literally.

That would be the chives, cilantro, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and other produce to be grown on a 300-square-foot wall outside the Sunset Strip nightclub.

The produce, expected to be planted this spring, is the latest local project by a Rochester, N.Y., company and its non-profit partner to “green” urban environments with vertical gardens.

“Not only will (the club) be growing food to supplement their fresh produce, but when people see it there’ll be a definite ‘Wow,’” said George Irwin, chief executive of the company, called Green Living. Technologies

The company’s technology makes use of modular stainless steel frames that hold special high-density soil manufactured from waste products. The vertical gardens are watered by automatic drip systems. The setup costs $125 to $150 per square foot.

The roughly $40,000 House of Blues project will be among the first at a business for Green Living and its partner, Urban Farming, which is a Detroit non-profit that seeks to end hunger by employing otherwise unused space.

Armed with grants from the Annenberg Foundation, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and the Los Angeles Office of Community Beautification, the partnership previously erected vertical gardens at the Weingart transitional housing facility on Skid Row, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and a low-income apartment complex.

The gardens help to feed residents of the facilities hosting them, or, in the case of the learning complex, its students.

“It’s a wonderful way to bring green space to urban areas and get people talking about food in a way that they wouldn’t have before,” said Meg Glasser, Urban Farming’s West Coast regional manager.

Since installing the four local gardens last year, the partnership has put them in elsewhere around the country. The House of Blues project is slated to be the first in Los Angeles with a paying customer.

Irwin believes the nightclub installation will put Green Living in a position to independently sell the gardens to other businesses nationwide.

“It will be edible, look good and smell good,” he said. “People will always remember where they saw it.”

No posts to display