Eating Out Grow your own food By Lena Pressesky amila Lambert, founder of Edible Urban Farm Company, is optimistic about her gardening start-up in spite of this year’s drought. For one thing, her company, which installs vegetable gardens in customers’ homes and offers optional maintenance programs for busier clients, has seen success since the start of this year’s drier weather. “People are a lot more conscientious about how much water they are using,” she said. “They want to use water for a good cause ... and gardens give something back.” Many of her customers saw the potential in their expansive green lawns and the practicality of the water they could be saving. But Silicon Valley is full of busy people, and though they may buy organic produce from the farmers market, many couldn’t fathom growing it themselves. Enter Edible Urban Farm Company and Lambert, with her green thumb and gardening know-how. Lambert’s interest in gardening began at Santa Clara University, where she majored in public health science and environmental studies. She got involved with the Forge, the university’s community garden, where she learned the basics of what to grow, and when. During her junior year, she spent a semester abroad, working with rice farmers in Thailand. After college, Lambert worked for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation doing community outreach for the Innovation Center. Still an avid gardener, she had already installed raised planters in family and friends’ gardens and said she figured she could make a fulltime career out of her passion.
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Lambert founded the company in January 2013, but didn’t leave PAMF to go pro-gardener until earlier this year. Last fall, she took the Gardening & Composting Educator Training Program at San Francisco’s Garden for the Environment — a program which teaches people how to teach others to grow plants. Now well into her first full growing season, she excitedly discussed new clients and new employees. “Initially, I was subcontracting from landscaping companies for labor,” she said. But she’s since hired a small team of her own, adding three members to her budding start-up. Installations can range in size and shape to fit in a variety of yard spaces. Lambert’s clients include Atherton and Woodside residents with acres of farm-ready private land as well as apartment dwellers with backyards as wide as an arm span. The company’s service area covers Redwood City to Sunnyvale, Portola Valley to East Palo Alto. “Our goal is to get everyone growing their own food,” Lambert said. The company does large and small installments, planter boxes and raised beds alike. Lambert admits it can be challenging when homes have limited space, but like any Silicon Valley entrepreneur, she welcomes the tribulations. “One installation we did a couple of months ago was in a really small backyard,” Lambert said, describing the yard’s sloping perimeter wall. “We ended up making the tomatoes vine up and over the fence.” Despite the literal barriers gardens may come up against, Lambert appreciates the simplicity of the company’s raised beds
and the flexibility they allow for customization. Lambert says you can really put them in any kind of configuration, from basic grids to angular U-shapes. “They’re kind of like Legos,” she said. The installation process runs around $1,000 for one 4-by-8 foot bed, and includes the labor, soil, planting, a drip irrigation system, seeds and seedlings. Clients can opt for the Garden Guru plan, a flat rate of $200 per month that includes maintenance by Lambert or one of her employees. They’ll take care of debugging or any other issues that arise, and leave a harvest box full of vegetables and recipes on the client’s doorstep. Lambert said about 90 percent of her clients opt for this service. So clients don’t have to worry about watering their gardens, Lambert and her team install drip irrigation systems, attached to
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Start-up installs, maintains organic vegetable gardens in local backyards
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Thai basil grows in a raised vegetable bed installed by the Edible Urban Farm Company.
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Kamila Lambert, founder of the Edible Urban Farm Company, waters the crops at a vegetable garden she installed in Atherton. ÜÜÜ°*> Ì " i°V ÊUÊ*> Ê Ì Ê7ii ÞÊUÊ >ÞÊÎä]ÊÓä£{ÊU Page 29