THE PLOTS THICKEN

Chefs unite globally under Kitchen Farming Project for an immersive garden-to-table experience

When the pandemic shuttered restaurants worldwide, out-of-work chefs planted vegetable patches known as kitchen gardens. Some had always wanted to but never found the time. understanding of the sweat and time that go into each vegetable, and its role in the food system. have signed on to the Kitchen Farming Project, following a loose garden “recipe” developed by the chef Dan Barber and Jack Algiere, the farm director of Stone Barns Center in the Hudson Valley in New York.

A famous farm-to-table advocate, Barber sees the project as a way to get chefs, who often work with farmers, to become farmers themselves, at least for a season.

The basic recipe for each garden is simple: a 12-by-15foot plot, broken into six produce families — tomatoes and peppers together in one section, iron-rich greens in

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As they approach the harvest, these chefs have a better

another. In emails during the growing season, Algiere offers general advice about crop spacing and irrigation.

One participant compared the guidelines to a mother sauce, a basic formula that can take many different forms.

The old guard of the farm-to-table movement focused

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More than 3,600 people

on local food. Many of these new kitchen gardeners are growing the foods of their culture, using traditional techniques that work in their particular environment.

Here are five gardens that illustrate the diversity of ways to interpret Barber and Algiere’s basic formula.

JAMES ESTRIN NYT Chef Dan Barber (left), who conceived the Kitchen Farming Project, and Jack Algiere, farm director at Stone Barns Center, who developed the project — a “loose” recipe for a kitchen garden — stand in a garden at Blue Hill Farm in Tarrytown, N.Y. Sidelined by the pandemic, cooks around the world are following their lead.