Step off a game drive in the Mara and the landscape tells one story: sun-bleached grass, acacia shadows, a horizon that goes on forever. Then you follow a winding footpath behind camp, and the story changes entirely. Here, you’ll find something unexpected – rows of deep green kale, tomato vines heavy with fruit, basil perfuming the warm air. A secret garden in the middle of the savannah.
This is the quiet, green side of a safari many guests aren’t aware of. At Asilia Africa, it’s also where dinner begins, seamlessly connecting the wild landscape to your plate.
Our Kilometre Zero Philosophy
Getting fresh produce to a remote safari camp is, by default, not a carbon-free affair. Vegetables are often trucked from distant markets, flown in on bush planes, packed into cool boxes that bounce down corrugated dirt roads for hours. By the time a tomato reaches the kitchen, it has travelled almost as far as most guests.
The Kilometre Zero philosophy flips that equation. Instead of importing flavour, we grow it – meters from the kitchen door, harvested the same afternoon it’s served. Fewer truck deliveries. Less plane cargo. Less packaging. More flavour.
It’s a small, practical piece of a much bigger commitment. Growing food on-site sits alongside our broader work in preserving biodiversity across East Africa – the kind of low-impact, high-intention choices that let luxury and sustainability share a plate.
Vertical Gardening: Maximising Freshness in the Mara
The Mara is bountiful with wildlife and unforgiving with gardens. Elephants have long memories and longer trunks. Baboons are opportunists. Rainfall is seasonal. In a region where humans and wildlife frequently conflict over access to land and the defence of agricultural activities, the solution is to grow up, not out.
Vertical gardens grow plants in stacked, upright layers, producing a high volume of herbs and leafy greens from a footprint smaller than a safari tent. They’re water efficient, easier to enclose and protect from curious wildlife, and they thrive in the Mara’s light.
At Encounter Mara’s vertical garden, rocket, spinach, coriander, basil, mint, and chives grow in dense, vivid columns behind the mess tent. The harvest lands on our plates the same evening – salads that taste like the land they come from, herbs still warm from the afternoon sun. For guests seeking a broader understanding of how East African camps feed themselves responsibly, our story on sustainable farming in the wild is a natural next read.
Nearby, eco-friendly Emboo Camp runs its own vertical garden as part of a camp designed end-to-end around circular principles – electric game-drive vehicles, water recycling, and produce grown within sight of the dining area. The vertical garden isn’t a novelty here. It’s a working piece of the kitchen, and a working piece of the ecosystem.
Ol Pejeta Bush Camp: The Traditional Veggie Garden
In Laikipia, the approach is different – because the land allows it. The soil at Ol Pejeta’s organic vegetable garden is rich, the altitude is kind to cool-weather crops, and the space is there to spread out.
The result is a proper kitchen garden in the classic sense: neat beds of spinach, kale, Swiss chard, tomatoes, courgettes, spring onions, and a fragrant corner of rosemary, thyme, parsley, and coriander. Everything is grown organically – no synthetic pesticides, no shortcuts. Our guests are welcome to wander through with the chef or camp manager before dinner.
It’s one of those small, unhurried moments that define the camp: dinner with provenance you can actually point to.
From Soil to Scrumptious: Why Homegrown Matters
A vegetable loses nutrients from the moment it’s picked. Produce harvested an hour before dinner – versus produce flown in days earlier – is measurably more nutrient-dense, with better texture and flavour to match. Guests notice. So do the chefs building menus around what’s ripe that week.
But the case for homegrown runs deeper than the plate.
Our kitchen gardens create year-round employment for local staff, and they’ve become informal training grounds in organic horticulture, composting, and water-wise growing – skills that stay in the community long after the season ends. Kitchen scraps are composted and returned to the beds, closing the loop between what goes into the kitchen and what comes out of it. Nothing is wasted. Everything feeds something else.
It’s a quiet kind of sustainability. No headlines, no hashtags – just the everyday work of growing food where you eat it.
Frequently Asked Questions: Sustainable Safari Dining
Yes, many leading eco-lodges, such as Asilia Africa’s Encounter Mara and Ol Pejeta Bush Camp, have established kitchen gardens. They range from traditional organic patches to innovative vertical gardens ensuring guests have access to fresh, “Kilometre Zero” produce.
A vertical garden is a space-saving agricultural method where plants are grown in upright layers. At Encounter Mara and Emboo, these systems allow camps to grow a high volume of leafy greens and herbs using minimal water and space, while remaining protected from local wildlife.
At Asilia camps, all homegrown vegetables are washed in purified, filtered water. Because they are grown on-site without harmful pesticides, they are often safer and fresher than produce transported over long distances.
Significantly. By growing food at the lodge, we reduce the ‘food miles’ associated with transport, decrease packaging waste, and allow for organic composting of kitchen scraps, which enriches the local soil.
Encounter Mara and Emboo Camp both run vertical gardens in the Maasai Mara, and Ol Pejeta Bush Camp maintains a traditional organic vegetable garden in Laikipia. Across the portfolio, camps work with the land and climate they’re in – some growing year-round, others seasonally – to put as much homegrown produce on the plate as possible.
Ready to come dine with us in the wild?
