Enter fourth-year Urban Planning student Michael Wideman. During a volunteer placement in India, where he helped an organization develop a model rooftop garden, Michael recognized the different challenges of growing your own food.
He joined both St. Paul’s GreenHouse and e-co-op through the Conrad Centre to develop a startup to make urban agriculture more easy and sustainable. At this point in the term, his startup, Eggplantr, is at an early stage, but Michael plans to develop an online tool where customers can input their food preferences, garden dimensions, and region, and receive a high-efficiency garden layout (using traditional companion-planting methods), printed on a biodegradable weed barrier that can simply be laid across a garden bed like landscape fabric. He believes this approach will simplify the work needed, while resulting in a better produce yield.
At the core of the name, Eggplantr is the idea that, just as an egg is symbolic of something new, so the idea of urban gardening is a new one, which Michael hopes to plant both physically in gardens and more broadly in society.
Living on campus is new for Michael.
"I love living at St. Paul’s GreenHouse,” he says. “It’s a close-knit community that is valuable in the stressful world of startups. Having one-on-one time with mentors is both valuable and comforting.”
He is also enjoying his e-co-op term. “I’m a very creative person so I really like being able to follow my own vision and work at my own pace — even the tedious tasks are satisfying.”
Michael plans to develop his startup over the next year, while also planning to pursue related studies in landscape architecture after graduation.
- by Susan Fish