Flip Clip: Update from Eastside Cafe in Austin, TX

We rolled into Austin, TX on Thursday night, and one of the first stops we made was to the Eastside Cafe, a restaurant that uses a lot of organic and local (some very local) ingredients. One thing that sets the Eastside apart from other restaurants is the organic vegetable garden located behind the restaurant. Most restaurant gardens I've seen consist of little more than a few rows of herbs and micro greens, but the garden at Eastside Cafe clearly produces a lot of food.

A large chicken coop abuts the restaurant, and there are several rows of raised beds with lettuce, cabbage, kale, herbs, and wildflowers. There are also lots of cool-looking bird houses and a couple of unconventional beds, like the bed frame pictured below. Coming from Chicago, we were amazed to see how far along the tomatoes are, but we've since learned that tomatoes are harvested in June and July in Texas.

-Mark

The Art of Urban Mobile Gardening

The local food movement has opened the door to a new crop of would-be gardeners who lack access to a patch of earth on which to plant a garden (myself included). For some, the land dilemma can be resolved by planting seeds in a shared community garden. Other space-challenged gardeners install planters and flower boxes on roofs and balconies, like this enterprising New Yorker, who developed a self-watering vegetable garden on his Manhattan fire escape last summer, using PVC buckets and two-liter soda bottles.

But what about the folks who don't have even an inch of outdoor space to call their own? Or on-the-go types, who for reasons unknown prefer to tote their pocket-size gardens around town with them? Eschewing the constraints of traditional, land-based gardens altogether, some gardening hobbyists instead choose to grow plants on mobile platforms that can be wheeled, carried or floated from place to place.

The most practical venue for a mobile garden is a wagon or trailer. In Portland, OR, for example, gardening educators use a 6- by 14-foot mobile garden that can be towed by a truck to teach about native species. Others can be pushed or pulled by hand, towed behind a car or bicycle, or chained to a street pole. Of these, the design firm Food Map created perhaps the most elegant (and at $255, easily the most expensive): a wheeled cart with a stylish white plastic planter box.

Limiting excess weight is a goal for most cyclists, but tricked-out bikes and motorcycles, laden with soil and plants are a mobile gardening staple. This prototype, described as a "bicycle window box- for the transient gardener" offers a simple solution for "the cyclist who is always on the move, or cycle tourist needing nutritious strawberries and beansprouts," according to the landless author. Other bike-garden inventions include the bicycle-mounted greenhouse, for the four-season grower, and the flower garden mounted on the sidecar of a scooter, photographed in Israel, which scores high marks for both form and function.

The French company Bacsac is the only business I know of that's entirely devoted to mobile gardening solutions. Their offerings range from cloth pots and satchels to a larger garden plot mounted on the roof of a car that looks like an overstuffed mattress (pictured above).

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