Within the red brick walls of a mill building in Easthampton, baby cucumbers are growing, destined to become pickles on hamburger sliders.
In another corner of the room, red peppers, which might find their way into a vegetarian chili, are just starting to sprout. Steps away, a vine will one day produce pumpkins that could be baked into pumpkin bread. Not far from that, heads of lettuce are ready for salads.
These are just a few of the edible plants growing in planters under the high ceilings at Mill 180 Park, an indoor park on Pleasant Street filled with natural light streaming in from huge windows. The bright, airy space which also includes artificial grass on terraced ledges, benches, stools and a wooden boardwalk weaving around the space, opened in September, a sort of experiment, to which owner Michael Sundel hoped to draw people of all ages.
There is no charge to enter and all the food served at the park’s cafe, “The Community Food Engine,” are snacks priced at around $2 to $3. A salad can be as simple as a small head of lettuce set into a plastic to-go container with mustard vinaigrette dressing and pine nuts. The smoothie comes with park-grown kale and is a mixture of orange juice, bananas, frozen raspberries and blackberries.
“The menu is a work in progress,” said Sundel in a recent interview. “The most important thing is to give people who come to the park food that is inexpensive, relatively healthful and easy to prepare.”
The idea seems to have caught on. There is steady business at the cafe, says Sundel. With a few hundred people showing up at the park on weekends, the gardens can’t keep up with demand and the staff is mostly limited to using the café-grown cucumbers for the pickles on the hamburger sliders and the greens in the salads, says Dustin Ashley Cote, the director of dining services.
But as the employees continue to develop the menu and learn about growing indoors, they plan to add more produce like tomatoes, which they are cultivating in a hot house downstairs, he said.
“We are going to have more and more food coming,” Sundel said.
For now other items round out the menu offerings: There’s whole plain yogurt with homemade granola, sourdough toast with butter, hot dogs and hamburger sliders topped with spicy kimchi sauce. The meat comes from Black River Produce, a distributor which gets its livestock from upstate New York and throughout New England.
There is whole milk from Mapleline Farm in Hadley. There is also a full wine and beer list.
Aside from the greens for the salads and smoothies and the cucumber pickles, herbs grown in the park make their way into recipes. Rosemary and basil, for instance, are infused into the cafe’s acidulated drinks, sparkling beverages with a vinegar syrup base, Sundel says.
In the coming months, there are plans for the cafe to offer gourmet dinners once a week to add to its other activities like music, yoga and a February winterfest, he said. Suggestions from the public are welcomed.
“Really anything goes,” he said. “We do have a very well equipped kitchen.”
Since opening, the park has been hosting a themed specialty beer night called the Monthly POUR, where, for under $10, a participant gets dinner to complement the beer of the night. So far, those meals have included beer-boiled sausage with peppers and onions, cheese plates and pork and tomato stew. The paired beers have been New City Brewery’s Ginger Beer and Stillwater Artisanal Ales Gose Gone Wild.
The next POUR is Wednesday with the theme “Hoppy New Year,” featuring a variety of hoppy beers, served with spicy Caribbean food. Though the menu has yet to be determined, Sundel says it’s likely the park-grown hot peppers will make an appearance in a hot sauce.
When you walk into the park through the large glass doors, the first greenery you see are rows of lettuce, stacked up tall in planters on towers. These plants are growing in rockwool, a fibrous material made from rock and chalk. They are being cultivated hydroponically, that is, in water and nutrient-based solutions without soil.
“It really is as simple as it looks,” said Sundel.
As with growing any plants, they need water, light, nutrients and oxygen.
Around the park, there are a number of hydroponic systems set up on pillars. They look almost like art installations with bright lights beaming from the center of the plants. Some of the hydroponic systems use aquarium pumps to oxygenate the water, so the plants don’t drown. Others use a flood and drain system, where throughout the day a pump sends water and nutrients to the plant’s basin.
Where the lettuce is growing, a stream of water drips down, and then drains from each plant.
“The plants don’t know that they are not in soil, they just know that they are getting a lot of light,” Sundel said.
Since they are grown inside without dirt, bugs are not an issue in the greens, so no pesticides are used. There is no grit from soil and the plants grow twice as fast as lettuce grown the traditional way, Sundel said. From start to finish, a crop of hydroponically grown lettuce can be ready to eat in just three weeks.
Aside from appearing in salad, the leafy greens are also another way to add to the atmosphere in the park.
“It’s attractive and it’s extremely productive,” said Sundel. “It just grows.”
Sundel started experimenting with hydroponic growing the year before he opened the park.
“Hydroponics is scary for a lot of people,” he said, “because it seems like a science experiment, but it is pretty simple.”
Every employee at the Mill 180 Park takes a turn tending to the plants, learning about hydroponics, cooking and cleaning. It’s a way to keep the employees happy and connected to the food that they are producing, Sundel says.
“My philosophy is that employees should be happy and you don’t get many happy employees if they are over the grill or in the dish room all day.”
A software developer in Virginia, Sundel, 56, discovered western Massachusetts when his daughter started at The Williston Northampton School in Easthampton four years ago.
Having grown up in New York City, he was inspired by the public parks near his childhood home, products of the urban park movement of the 19th century in which community leaders sought to create green public spaces where people of all economic backgrounds could mingle.
When he starting thinking about opening an indoor park Sundel decided that space in one of Easthampton’s old mill buildings would work well. When he contemplated what people tend to like to do in parks, eating seemed obvious and growing the food indoors could provide the greenery that would make the park’s atmosphere appealing, he says.
“We don’t want people to just come here for the food, the food is for people who would come here otherwise.”
Sundel says the park has had a particular attraction for young families, even more than he expected. On any given day, you might find a crowd of parents munching on snacks while their toddlers, play on the artificial grass or climb on the terraced ledges. There are picnic tables and bar stools lined up near the windows where people can sip coffee and read.
His wife, Lystra Blake, is the park’s chief operating officer. She runs the show while Sundel continues to commute between Virginia and western Mass every other weekend. That arrangement will continue, he says, at least until the park starts making a profit. Meshing his two jobs, he says, he plans to develop a software to help make the park run efficiently, which will keep track of all aspects of running the park, like food expiration dates.
“It’s kind of neat to have two lives,” he said. “My life is very full.”
Below is the recipe Cote, the director of dining services. passed along for the kimchi sauce that gives the café’s sliders a kick.
1½ cups water
¼ cup rice flour
¼ cup sugar
1½ tablespoon of salt
½ radish, cut into strips
1 head garlic, minced
½ inch piece of ginger, minced
½ cup Korean hot pepper powder
3 scallions cut into 2-inch pieces
Mix flour and water in pan before bringing to a boil. When the mixture begins to bubble, turn off the heat and allow to cool. Add the sugar. Add the other ingredients and mix well until it turns to a thick texture. Add hot pepper and garlic as needed.
Leave the sauce out at room temperature for a day, then refrigerate. As it ferments, the flavor will go from sweet to sour.
Lisa Spear can be reached at Lspear@gazettenet.com.