Backyard Eats owner Chris Mattingly with his six-month-old son, Caleb. (Photo by Lucy Curtis)

by Lucy Curtis

The green leaves of growing pumpkins spill over a stone wall, tomatoes reach towards the sun and watermelon plants clamber up a wooden trellis. A few blocks away a meticulously designed berry garden begins to produce fruit.

All around Chestnut Hill, plant beds designed with the know-how of an engineer and the heart of a gardener are flourishing. These gardens were created by Chris Mattingly, a Chestnut Hill resident who turned a love of growing his own food into a business helping other people do the same through a company called Backyard Eats.

Mattingly founded Backyard Eats in early spring of this year. The company specializes in designing and maintaining gardens geared towards growing fruits and vegetables.

“My passion has always been in gardening,” Mattingly said.

Mattingly is a licensed civil engineer, and before founding Backyard Eats he worked in landfill design and maintenance. This career did not align with his environmentalist values, but he took the job to gain experience. He planned to seek another job doing similar work, but this time with a mission.

His path didn’t quite work out that way, though. The company Mattingly worked for experienced a series of layoffs, and he took that opportunity to begin his own company.

He completed the preparations for Backyard Eats in February of this year and began planting in May. This season he had seven clients: some friends and colleagues of Mattingly and his wife and some the result of yard signs and an ad in the Local.

Backyard Eats begins its process of designing vegetable gardens with a free initial consult with the client. During this consult Mattingly determines which plants the client wants to grow, and conducts a sun exposure analysis, which lets him know when and where in the garden the sun shines.

Mattingly then begins the design and installation of the garden. Besides building the beds and trellises and planting the produce, Backyard Eats also installs an automated irrigation system, which means the garden doesn’t need to be watered by hand.

Once the garden is installed, Mattingly stops by either weekly, bi-weekly or monthly to check on the garden, weed and keep up with pruning and seeding. During this first season of planting Mattingly has learned a lot about running this kind of business.

“This season is all about focusing on those few clients and understanding their wants, and about getting the process down,” he said.

Mattingly said that servicing gardens only every few weeks is “a different kind of challenge.”

“With your own garden, you can walk out and check the plants every night, but here you have to do it well so you can come back in two weeks and everything’s perfect,” he said. “It’s a new technical challenge I’m working through this summer.”

Mattingly is often accompanied on these visits to the gardens by his son, Caleb.

“I can’t wait to teach him about plants and gardening,” Mattingly said.

Mattingly and his wife, Allison, have been gardening since their move to Chestnut Hill four years ago. As the years went by, their garden became more and more abundant, and they got so much happiness from their garden that Mattingly knew he needed to do more.

Since the inspiration for Backyard Eats came from his own garden, Mattingly brings with him a passion for growing local and delicious food that can be incorporated into meals.

“A big part of for me was providing clients with recipes for eating the food in their garden,” he said. “That experience of letting the garden dictate the menu, or at least guide it, and finding easy recipes that use a lot of what you have in the garden. It was that experience that brought me to the conclusion that [I] needed to start this.”

In the fall of 2015 Mattingly completed the Philadelphia County Master Gardener Program through the Penn State Agricultural Extension. For the volunteer portion of his class, he built garden beds for Jenks School, and he sees himself becoming more involved in the community as time goes on.

“The experience with Jenks has been really good,” he said. “I don’t see why that couldn’t be replicated in other markets.”

Mattingly has a very strong volunteerism background and he brings that idea of service and helping others to his work.

Mattingly plans to expand Backyard Eats next season so it services more of the Philadelphia market. He hopes to design and tend gardens in the Northwest, the suburbs, and maybe even Center City. In terms of his five-year plan Mattingly said, “ultimately I see it as a mid-Atlantic company.”

Backyard Eats is still a work in progress, though Mattingly is excited and hopeful that it will continue to grow and flourish. He is still not sure what he will do in the winter when there is no planting to be done. Installation, however, can be done during that time. It could also serve as time to simply regroup.

Though Mattingly has not figured out everything about the future of Backyard Eats, he is looking forward to being busier and refining his process as he goes.

“I started this to really share the gardening food experience,” Mattingly said. “Just being in the garden, thinking ‘Other people need to experience this.’”

As Backyard Eats grows and services more gardens, Mattingly is sure to spread his gift and passion for gardening to many more people.

To learn more about Backyard Eats and the services it offers, visit www.backyard-eats.com.