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Charter builds community with vegetable and flower garden

A garden on the rooftop of one of CulinArt’s corporate dining accounts has yielded a bountiful harvest in its first year, providing produce for both café menus as well as donations to a food recovery organization.

Last spring, a group of employees at Charter Communications, in Stamford, Conn., approached Diane Russo, CulinArt’s director of dining services, about creating a garden. Their goals were twofold:  plant vegetables that could be served in the dining service, and plant flowers and other plants as a way to beautify the campus and build a sense of community. Thus, the Charter Community Garden was born.

The garden resides in an outdoor dining space that connects the two towers that comprise the Charter headquarters in Stamford. It consists of five beds, each with its own name and designation for a particular type of plant:

  • Salad—Including lettuce, Swiss chard, kale, and spinach
  • Herb—lavender, thyme, mint, parsley, cilantro, and others
  • Center—cabbage, Jalapeno peppers, chives, ornamental peppers
  • Side (2)—ginger and blanket flowers

The garden was planted in late May and maintained by a group of Charter volunteers who took turns watering the plants and weeding the five raised beds. Russo’s early apprehension about whether anything would grow quickly faded as the summer months wore on.

“We had great success growing flowers and edibles, mostly greens and herbs,” she says. “We originally used the produce that was harvested on the salad bar and on our Global Bar and marketed it as ‘Locally Sourced.’ We also used the harvest as décor inside the café.”

Russo and Fiona Li, Charter’s senior communications manager, provided their design concept to the Charter associates to help educate them about the project. “I had also hoped that if this garden was successful,” Russo adds, “we would be able to encourage other CulinArt units to embrace a similar plan.”

With the weather turning cold and the beds being prepped for winter, Russo found herself with such bounty from the Garden that the group made donations to Food Rescue US, which transfers food to social service agencies serving the food insecure. And, she adds, “there has been some talk about composting…but that is a long way off.”

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