Winnipegger takes indoor, vertical gardening to new heights

A young, Winnipeg fresh food entrepreneur is taking vertical gardening to new heights with a company he calls OrganiX XOXO.

Constantine Gamvrelis operates a sprouts and microgreens business at the Osborne Village farmers' market on McMillan Avenue, and he spoke to CBC about what he's growing in his garden, how to have fresh greens year round (yes, even in Winnipeg) and having Janet Jackson as a customer.

Tell me about your garden.

I have a vertical gardening grow room in the basement of the Osborne farmers' market. We have the best growing equipment in terms of lights, fertilizers … and trays. We've got a really quick turnover time of an extremely high-nutrient product so we're very proud of what we do. We can fit six or eight trays per shelf and do a lot of gardening in a compact space.

[Plants grow to be] an inch and a half or 10 inches, depending on what crop it is. That's how we deliver them to restaurants or the public.

What plants are you growing in your garden?

In front of us we've got this pink amaranth and then we have oriental spicy mustard and regular yellow mustard. [There] are speckled pea shoots, there's sunflowers just behind them. Green basil [is] here, purple basil behind it and …we've got arugula, … alfalfa, kale, garbanzo [and] chickpeas.

They are all little shoots, not fully formed plants.

The most nutrition you can get out of plants is in their micro stage. So, before they get their second sets of leaves is when they are absolutely at their most nutrient-dense.

Who are your customers?

We supply to the public and to just over 30 restaurants within the city. So, we do weekly deliveries and chefs can keep these on their kitchen lines. Families can keep them on a shelf or in their window. A lot of our crops are "cut and come again," just like our basil, our sunflowers, our speckled peas.

That means we'll deliver about an eight to 10-inch crop then you take off the top four inches, use those and let the next bottom grow in. So, it's really productive.

How difficult is it to use the crops once you deliver them?

It doesn't take a lot of education to be a good gardener but make sure that your facility is running at high capacity. Humidity's important, germination as far as the heat mats we use really improves it. There's a lot of different tricks you can do to make the turnaround time a lot quicker and we take a lot of pride into the quality we can deliver.

What is the appeal for diners in what you're growing and delivering?

Typically in the cooking world for mainstream restaurants, microgreens and shoots have been more of a garnish than an ingredient. But, at the price point that I can sell them to restaurants because of how we farm this, now we can use garnishes and shoots as a main ingredient in dishes.

So, this takes something that was very financially inaccessible to chefs and now it's very financially accessible. Some of the crops, it's "cut and come again" so some restaurants in the city are getting four crops off of one tray.

Do the crops taste different from one another?

Oh, completely. The pink amaranth is totally flavourless. 

What's amaranth?

It turns into a huge, red plant. It's a south American plant. But it's as you can see [the stems] are pink and so this is great because there's no flavour at this stage of the plant's life but it pops off of a plate.

If you're serving a dish, whatever flavour or whatever intention the chef had, it's not going to distract from the flavour whereas the mustard, the arugula, is very, very strong. The micro basil is mind-blowingly strong. One little leaf is just extremely strong so chefs, it goes a long way on a sandwich.

Arugula is very, very peppery in its infancy stage and as it grows — it will grow as high as you want it — it will mellow out the flavour to a more traditional, bigger-leaf arugula.

How did you get into this in the beginning?

I started doing this to supplement my income in the states. What I just saw with the price of arugula was I said, 'Hey, if I bring you a couple trays of it would you buy it from me?' and they said, 'Yeah, of course. Good luck.' So, I went back to my apartment and set up a shelf and started doing this and … I had very large success in the states. So, being from Winnipeg, I grew up in the country out in Charleswood and I was like, 'If I can do this in Manhattan, I can really do this in Charleswood.'

So the spring of I guess 2015 I came back here, built a bunch of green houses and really went at it. 

How big is your operation?

We've got two towers in New York.

What are towers?

Towers are these vertical palette shelves that we've built. So, I call these grow towers and it's really the standard in vertical gardening culture [because] you're going up as opposed to wide.

And then we've got four [towers] down here and we've got another three at our warehouse down in [Manitoba's] Headingley.

How do you find customers?

They are finding us.

The future of food is local and organic. Chefs can do this right in their restaurant — there's probably half a dozen restaurants that I set up indoor grow rooms for.

So, chefs that love and appreciate this can produce it on their own even cheaper. With a little bit of guidance and help, they can do it just as easily as anybody. Families can do this at home. A lot of people have great kitchens and barely use their cupboard space. If you put one of these T5 lights in your cupboards, you can have fresh greens all year round. And for a lot of people like students and families who don't have the budget to buy it all the time, a little bag of seed and a small bag of soil adds a lot of nutrition.

You had said Janet Jackson is a client of yours.

Yeah. She came in and we do deal with Centerplate and they run out of the MTS Centre so they supply everybody who goes through there so our first gig with them was the Janet Jackson concert.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.