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Welcome to the Sunny Point Café Garden

SP-Spade-to-Spoon

Welcome to the Sunny Point Café kitchen garden blog! The Sunny Point garden began as a small plot a few years ago…just a matter of yards from the back door of the kitchen. The space has grown and shifted since then, but it remains just steps away from the bustling kitchen where our delicious food is made.

The garden has had many creative minds and hard-working hands involved in its growth over the years, and these individuals have all had a great impact on this project. So, thank you to everyone involved, both past and present, for all of our work and ideas have melded and lend the garden its unique frame-work and continued success. Additionally, the pride and love that the owners of this establishment provide to the garden project is indispensable and a constant rock of support, allowing the garden to flourish and grow! Come along as winter turns to spring and the food continues to grow: from the garden to the table…

We have entitled this blog “Spade to Spoon,” to honor the connection of fresh produce, herbs, and flowers being grown organically on-site and delivered right to the kitchen. Through our “garden to table” ideal we are able to provide local and organic produce from our very own backyard, a concept that is not only ecologically sound, but aesthetically pleasing, as well.

This kitchen garden model, and its example as a productive use of land, is educational and satisfying not only for the Sunny Point Café gang of employees, but for all of our lovely patrons from near and far, and the community of West Asheville itself. Welcome to our garden!

Thanks for your support. Follow us on our blog as the garden grows and transitions throughout the seasons. And, as we celebrate the relationship between the kitchen and the garden…where food grows from a tiny seed and meets the knives of creative chefs, all within an acre…from spade to spoon.

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Seed Starts

SP-Garden-Starts

Yes, folks, it is that time already! Here in the Sunny Point garden we start nearly all of our own vegetables and flowers from seed. The many little seedling beauties have been growing beneath the warmth of the grow lights for awhile now, as we tend to start our first round of seedlings in early March in order to get a jump start on the season. But have no fear, fellow gardeners, it is never too late! There are cool spring crops that can be direct sown in the garden, such as peas, beets, and carrots.

This photo captures our baby lettuce that will soon be transplanted outside. While it is still too cold at night here in Zone 7 for such sun-loving veggies as tomatoes and peppers, they can be started by seed indoors and transplanted outside when the temperatures rise… It is incredibly satisfying to take a teensy-tiny seed, sow it, and watch it transform into a seedling, then a full fledged plant. Really, it’s the little things in life, right?

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Tomatoes!

Sunny Point Garden TomatoesTomatoes! So many wonderful varieties.

Fresh tomatoes are one of the great joys of having a vegetable garden. Yes, the plants can be tricky to grow and take a lot of care, but when harvest time comes along it is all worth it. In our opinion, eating a fresh tomato is one of the defining tastes of summer.

Visitors to our garden remark on the wide variety of tomatoes we have growing, often in colors they have never seen. Each year we plant a different combination of tomato varieties and there are always numerous volunteer plants that come up around the edges of the garden. At harvest time, the spread of colors, shapes and sizes is beautiful.

Our recent harvest basket containing the following varieties, shown clockwise starting in the upper left: Egg Yolk (round, yellow), Indigo Cherry Drops (round, purple/orange), Blueberries (smaller round, purple/orange), Blue Beauty (large irregular, pink/blue), one of our volunteer plants (large round, red), Black Vernisage (medium round, striped red/green), more Indigo Cherry Drops and Blueberries, Black Beauty (medium irregular, deep purple), Atomic Grape (medium oblong, striped green/yellow), another volunteer plant (small oblong, red), and Micheal Palin (medium pear, striped yellow/green).