white house vegetable garden digging starts TODAY!!!

I have to quote a friend (Victoria) on this one:

"Woooo hooo!!!! The first vegetable garden on the White House lawn since Eleanor Roosevelt! Score a big one for the local food movement! Michele ROCKS!"

New York Times
Obamas to Plant White House Vegetable Garden
By MARIAN BURROS
Published: March 19, 2009
WASHINGTON — On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut.
While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at time when obesity has become a national concern.
In an interview in her office, Mrs. Obama said, “My hope is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”
Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig up the soil for the 1,100-square-foot plot in a spot visible to passers-by on E Street. (It’s just below the Obama girls’ swing set.) Students from the school, which has had a garden since 2001, will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs.
Almost the entire Obama family, including the president, will pull weeds, “whether they like it or not,” Mrs. Obama said laughing. “Now Grandma, my mom, I don’t know.” Her mother, she said, would probably sit back and say: “Isn’t that lovely. You missed a spot.”
Whether there would be a White House garden has been more than a matter of landscaping. It’s taken on political and environmental symbolism as the Obamas have been lobbied for months by advocates who believe that growing more food locally could lead to healthier eating and lessen reliance on huge industrial farms that use more oil for transportation and chemicals for fertilizer.
In the meantime, promoting healthful eating has become an important part of Mrs. Obama’s agenda.
...

Here's the link:
New Vegetable Garden for White House Lawn
White House veggie garden proposal

video - white house veggie garden

This is a great video! It shows a time-lapse of a man digging, planting and harvesting a new vegetable garden in his front yard (a small "white house"). An analogy is made to THE white house. He makes a lovely garden with great beds and rows of veggies. Tomatoes and radish are harvested. Watch it if you like to watch a garden grow. Its also a nice "how-to" if you want to start your own garden.

This is just what I often imagine when I see a nice sunny green lawn! Politics aside, vegetable gardening is just a very rewarding pastime.

White House veggie garden proposal

vegetable garden politics

I came Micheal Pollen's letter in the NY Times this week (I'm a bit late, I've been too busy):

"Farmer in Chief", a letter to the NY Times by Michael Pollen (link):

I added a few excerpts here, because its a great topic, but you can go ahead and read all 8,000 words (!) yourself.

"After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent." "...chemical fertilizers, pesticides, farm machinery, modern food processing, packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food."

What to do?
Resolarize the American Farm
Reregionalize the Food System
Rebuild America’s Food Culture

"...most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

"When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

"I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement."

Just imagine! I bet it would be a beautiful garden!

KGI originated this proposal with their "Eat the View" campaign. They have some nice information on this topic here.

White House veggie garden proposal

outsourcing vegetable gardening and CSAs

Here's a wild new idea.

Excerpts:

... MyFarm is an enterprise that puts vegetable gardens into people's backyards, then sends a gardener once a week to do upkeep and harvest, leaving fresh produce behind ... Trevor Paque calls his enterprise a "decentralized urban farm." ... aims to turn under-used, overgrown backyards into plots of green that will provide organically grown food .... what makes Paque's venture different is that he sees all the gardens as merely components of one large farm .... His plan is to take that land and use it to create a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). ... The more extra produce a yard grows, over and above the owners' needs, the less they will pay for weekly upkeep.

Here's the link for MyFarm's website. They have great photos of their gardens.

What a concept! Can you imagine a vegetable garden in EVERY backyard ... or front yard. Not only the White House, but every house.

Why do this? I think I have a list somewhere back in my blog of a few reasons to grow vegetable gardens. Here it is. I think most of these apply. Of course Pollan has written well detailed reasons: NY Times article and Moyer interview.

CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)
White House veggie garden proposal