Last month Curated Properties and Windmill launched a “residential agri-tecture” project on Toronto’s Queen West called The Plant. 

The entire development is oriented around our connection to food. The building will have an interior greenhouse and an industrial style common area kitchen for food prep and events. Each unit will have micro-garden beds for fresh herbs and lattices for growing your own food.

This is a trend that I hope we see more of going forward. Toronto developers such as TAS have been incorporating urban agricultural elements into their projects for a number of years now and I believe it has the potential to become quite common, particularly for end user buildings. 

I grew veggies and hot peppers on my terrace one summer and there was something really nice about walking outside to harvest a salad. The hardest part for me, though, was getting enough sun exposure. Some of my crop wasn’t getting enough sun, but for whatever reason my hot peppers really thrived.

If all of this does really catch on, I could imagine a world where condos and apartments get marketed based on the precise amount of sunshine hours they receive throughout the year. Perhaps some developers are already doing that.

One of the best things about Toronto in the summer is that it feels like there’s a special event happening almost every day of the week. It would be impossible to go to everything, but one of my favorites is StreetFest at the Beaches Jazz Festival, which is running this week from Thursday (July 24) to Saturday (July 26).

If you’re from Toronto, then you’ve probably been. But if you haven’t been, StreetFest is basically a 2.5 km stretch of Queen Street East in the Beaches that gets closed to traffic so that hundreds of thousands of pedestrians can walk around and listen to jazz music on the street. It’s a lot of fun and I’m told there will be 40 bands this week.

This year TAS has sponsored a tent and so the Kingston&Co Condominiums team will be there to talk to people about our project (and also listen to some jazz music!). I’ll be there on Thursday night (tomorrow) and so if you’re around, come by and say hello. If you can’t find us, send me a tweet.

If you haven’t been to StreetFest before, here are two tips. It gets super busy and traffic is often bad heading in and out of the area. If you have the option of biking there (or riding on someone else’s handlebars), I would highly recommend that.

Also, given how busy it is, I remember it being difficult to find a beer the last time I went – all the restaurants and patios were full. So you may want to consider investing in a CamelBak Pack. We wouldn’t want you getting dehydrated :)

I hope to see some of you there.

Image: JR Photography

This past week we opened the doors to the presentation center for Kingston&Co Condominiums. It was pretty chaotic leading up to the opening, but everything worked out and I think our party was a great success. 

These early events are an opportunity for the media to see the project and the presentation center, and for the project team to enjoy some of the fruits of their hard work. I think those times are important. When everyone is moving quickly to meet deadlines, sometimes it’s easy for things to get impersonal. So it’s nice to be able to sit back, have a glass of wine, and tell someone that you appreciate all of their hard work.

Below is another photo from the event. I’m the second from the right, wearing a sweaty pink shirt. I had planned to go home and change before the event, but I instead got wrapped up moving things around and getting the presentation center ready. On a related note, there’s a tree trunk beside the sofa in the reception area that weighs almost 400 pounds. If you can lift it on your own, or even just move it on your own, I’ll buy you a round of drinks.

If you’d like to learn more about Kingston&Co, click here. And if you get a chance to check out the presentation center, make sure you tweet me and let me know what you think.

Images: BuzzBuzzHome