Johannes Schwarz offers "Klimbim for the plate".

Excellent herbs, exotic spices, edible flowers.

Poison green coriander cress, light green Japanese stone parsley and reddish veins grow in his nursery, cream-colored daylilies, bright blue cornflowers and colorful horned violets bloom.

What Schwarz Klimbim calls crowns the creations of top chefs not only as decoration, but is also a delicacy itself.

And fills the gardener's cash register.

But the top gastronomy is still tight almost everywhere, because only in a few federal states is it possible to dine indoors under strict conditions, based on the incidence value.

Most top chefs are still skeptical and prefer to wait a few days longer before they invite you back.

Only a few of them have tables outside the restaurant, where eating out is now allowed everywhere, and actually use this.

A cautious start, however, which also gives Black courage.

“My shop stands and falls with the gastronomy,” says the man who actually supplies many of Munich's top chefs with the finest herbs and the best vegetables.

This “fruitful cooperation almost collapsed in the pandemic”.

Last spring Bayern got completely cold.

The customers stay away

In the greenhouses there were around 1000 bowls with cresses and herbs, ideally grown. Not small ones like the ones from the supermarket. Its vessels are 50 by 30 centimeters in size. “In the end I threw them all away.” Selling them to amateur chefs was not an option, everything was closed in the first lockdown in 2020.

Schwarz had 30 customers. “At the moment there are three percent left.” Now he has one bowl in the car, sometimes three. It's actually not worth it. But so he stays in the conversation. Also with Tohru Nakamura, with whom the gardener has worked for a long time and will continue to do so. In the autumn, Nakamura, who won two Michelin stars with his kitchen crew in the now permanently closed Munich “Werneckhof”, is to open his new restaurant in the “Schreiberei”. Black remains his partner. Until then, the chef is happy to buy a wild herb salad as a side dish for his vegetarian Hokkaido burger, which he sells as street food for the transition. Shortly before Christmas, Schwarz was standing next to the cook's stand with colorful bags full of chillies and seeds from his vegetable garden. A duo for mutual support.

It is “emotionally rousing”, says the gardener, who is now concentrating on the sale of young tomato and cucumber plants.

"With cresses and herbs I can start again at short notice, if it is foreseeable, then I need four weeks until they are ready for harvest." It could be so far any day.

Schwarz is sure, "I can get through this".

He sees that “new projects are emerging right now”.

Restaurants plan roof gardens, "and I can advise them".

The cooks can benefit from the gardening supervisor again, and this is a new field for Schwarz.

He is currently talking to Edip Sigl, who has moved from the Munich “Les Deux” to the Chiemgau resort “Das Achental” and is taking over the “es: senz” restaurant there.

Sigl wants to set up a greenhouse there, and Schwarz is a conceptual architect and cultivation assistant.