Kitchen By Mike

Garden With Mike; a project by KITCHEN by Mike

‘Garden with Mike’ is a garden space that we’d like to build here at Kitchen by Mike, our young but successful canteen in Rosebery located in Sydney, Australia. The aim of the multi-purpose garden is to inspire, nurture and educate the kitchen staff and our community. Looking outside to check on the garden and creating a menu around the produce that’s flourishing will yield “simple, seasonal and fresh” food, which is always the focus of the food at Kitchen by Mike. Our fantastic team in the kitchen will get to learn more about the seasonality of their ingredients, making them better at their craft. Our community will be able to come and attend hands-on workshops held in the garden to learn about composting, worm farming or companion planning, for example.

Launching just at the start of summer, our dream is to be able to fund the garden and break ground on this special growing space just after the beginning of the year. We can’t wait to share all the details with you below and invite you to join us in making the garden take root (every pun intended). Kitchen by Mike is here for the long-haul with or without the garden, but we need local support to be able to make our longevity here greener, and more lush and productive. We celebrate in the idea of “farm to table”, but let’s shorten the process to be “garden to plate”!

Ultimately it will be guests and supporters that reap the benefits – though as knowledge on how to replicate sustainable living in your own space, as a delicious meal or bottled product, as a lovely place to come and visit, or as a unique reward for our funders. Watch the video, read through the plans, check out the thoughtful and intriguing rewards, browse our website, come have lunch with us, and please consider helping us by contributing to our garden fund.

The Garden’s Story

Our home here in Rosebery had been an old, crumbling warehouse that had previously housed a canning factory. Russel and Sasha of Koskela, an Australian furniture design company, invited Mike McEnearney (he’s the Mike at Kitchen by Mike) to join forces and renovate this space into the beautiful environment that it is now. Natural finishes, raw elements, repurposed materials, honest food – efforts have always been towards being sustainable and simple. Since our opening in February of this year (2012), we’ve enjoyed lots of growth not only with our regular offerings of breakfast and lunch daily, but with dinners, special events, collaborations and exciting press, and lots of opportunity to make our own jams, chutneys, relishes, pickles and salts. As we’ve looked ahead to upcoming seasons, we’ve dreamed of making a beautiful venue in the garden in our current cement lot. To prepare for this, Mike, Sasha and Russel worked with landscape designers to plan a unique and productive garden that fits the bill of our collective dream, but the project won’t become a reality without your support.

Why does a successful business need funding?

Yes, the canteen is lively and doing well, but a garden is a project that will never pay for itself. The capital needed to launch the garden is a big amount – an amount that we won’t ever reach as overhead just by the daily business here. The canteen will fund the ongoing costs to maintain the garden, but your help will assist with all the initial building costs. If the garden doesn’t get funded, we’ll go on with the rewarding work we’ve been doing, but how much more enriching for our guests, the kitchen staff and community if we were able to go ahead with it!

We want this for us: to be greener and more environmentally responsible with our canteen, to offer more products (teas, honey and new bottled items) and to mature sensitivity towards seasonality. But more, we want this for you: to eat better food with us, to increase the biodiversity in the city, and be inspired while you dine in a beautiful space.

Garden Plans – what the funding will provide:

- Bees // We’ve worked with a bee keeper to start prepping urban bee houses that will be installed on our roof and in the garden. The bees will serve as mini-horticulturists, tending to and pollinizing our chunk of biodiversity with the surrounding neighborhoods. They will also eventually yield honeycomb, a favorite ingredient of ours in the kitchen, after a few seasons of their new home in Rosebery.

- Compost // The kitchen produces delicious food every day of the week, and organic waste is part the cycle of running a canteen. With an area to be able to compost, we would reduce our waste and repurpose it towards feeding our garden rich and nutritious fertiliser.

- Challenge the design of a traditional productive garden // Instead of gridded rows of seedlings, we’ve opted to embrace organic shapes and plans to hopefully make it also a lovely environment. We hope to also inspire people to replicate this design as more people are investing in gardening on some scale in urban places.

- Rain Collection // Koskela and us occupy a large plot here on Dunning avenue, and when it rains, at the moment all of the rain runs straight back into the storm drains. However, we could easily modify the gutters to collect this runoff into rainwater tanks that would be used to nurture the garden.

- Workshop Space // Permaculture, companion planting, natural pesticides, and composting worm farming are topics that we’d like to provide an opportunity and venue to educate about. Kitchen by Mike would obviously utilise this, but our hope is that our community would embrace the venue’s potential too.

- Increased Biodiversity in the City // The health of our ecosystem is improved with every garden and sustainable practice. Adding this garden will help towards balancing the scale between organic cycles and our imposing society functions that we all know to be incredibly important. Sustainability is in Kitchen by Mike’s bones – our desire is for our endeavor here to be as responsible as we can manage.

Giving Back to YOU

More than just the benefits the garden will bring to everyone, we wanted to offer thoughtful and intriguing benefits to our supporters. We put our heads together to come up with meaningful experiences, personalised products, special opportunities. We’re inviting you to be part of our story and your help with this is invaluable to us. Get behind the counter into the heart of Kitchen By Mike with all of our unique rewards.

Thank you for taking the time to read though our plan and thoughts. We hope you’re able to find a reward that seems exciting to you and you believe in what we’re trying to do as well. Please consider contributing to this goal. DIY is popular, but isn’t DIT (Doing it together) much more valuable?