Name: Launch Extreme Salad World
Start: 2026-05-31T11:00:00+02:00
End: 2026-05-31T17:00:00+02:00
Location: Zone2Source

The Gardener’s Assembly begins with a workshop by the artist collective Genomic Gastronomy in their artist garden.
About this Event

The workshop, Soil & Taste Test—which includes renaming the garden to Extreme Salad World—concludes with a communal lunch. Afterward, we move to the Shadow Garden, where gardeners from artist gardens, community gardens, and activist gardens gather to exchange stories, knowledge and experiences.

11:00–13:00 workshop EXTREME SALAD WORLD: Soil & Taste Test

Location: Genomic Gastronomy Garden (former seal enclosure, near het Glazen Huis)

In this workshop, hosted by Zack Denfield and Cathrine Kramer from the Genomic Gastronomy collective we will harvest and taste dozens of plants from the Extreme Salad Garden. Using slow observation and custom software, we will document the late-spring edible biodiversity and the garden’s current soil cycles. Each plant we meet interacts with the soil in different ways, and collectively they are managed within the garden in order to regenerate soil. This workshop is a way to collaboratively generate an image of complex plant and soil interactions and taste the wild and cultivated plants on site. At the conclusion of the workshop we will have assembled: a plant herbarium, a digital map of the site and a very biodiverse salad which we will serve as part of a lunch we will share together.

Launch of EXTREME SALAD WORLD, a biodiversity-maximizing kitchen garden that is unreasonable packed with as many raw, edible plant species as can possibly fit into a small urban park. Inspired by near-Arctic gardener Stephen Barstow’s legendary 200+ ingredient salads, the garden rejects monoculture and efficiency in favor of vegetal hedonism: an overload of perennial and unconventional plants eaten raw, turning the city into a site of extreme cultivation and flavor.

13:00 – 14:30 FOODSHED SOIL PICNIC

The communal lunch will be composed of different ingredients from the Amsterdam foodshed, served on a European soil map tablecloth and arranged by distance: from the hyperlocal (foraged on site), the regional (North Holland), to the bioregional (Atlantic mixed forests of Europe), all the way to the continental. Late May offers an ideal moment to gather the first fresh harvests of spring while reflecting on the broader supply chains that shape our foodshed throughout the seasons.