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Eat the View: The White House Organic Garden Campaign approaches turning the White House lawn -- and your lawn -- into a vegetable garden with a sense of humor.

"Eat the View!" is a campaign to urge the Obamas to replant a large organic Victory Garden on the First Lawn with the produce going to the White House kitchen and to local food pantries.

"Eat the View" is coordinated by Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based 501c3 nonprofit network of 10,000 gardeners from 100 countries who are inspiring and teaching more people to grow some of their own food.

Among its action items,

2) Sign our "White House Food Garden Petition" which we will deliver to President-elect Obama along with a diverse collection of heirloom seed packets.

3) Contact President-elect Obama's transition office directly here. Tell him you'd like him to replant an organic garden on the White House lawn. There's an opportunity to attach a photo to your request. You can grab one here.

The effort is the brainchild of Roger Doiron, an organic gardener and food activist from Scarborough, Maine.

And yes, it's time to start planning your 2009 garden. Winter has turned the corner, and we're heading back towards spring.

Victory Garden how-to:

Victory Garden video: A wartime family plants, cultivates and harvests a large garden, all compressed to 20 minutes, from the Prelinger Archive at the Internet Archive.

Victory Gardens; Handbook of the Victory Garden Committee, War Services, Pennsylvania State Council of Defense, April, 1944, Table of contents | Garden plans

This is online at Earthly Pursuits, a nice site offering "an eclectic look at old-fashioned and new-fangled ideas about gardening, botany, agriculture, horticulture, floriculture, the language of flowers, bibliomania, food, life and other earthly things.".

URI Master Gardeners section on Vegetable Gardening includes a Rhode Island Planting Calendar for Fruits and Vegetables (pdf) that suggests starting broccoli seeds indoors Feb. 15, so it's not too early to start lining up your seed starting area -- even though there's an arctic cold front moving in tomorrow.

Simple Seed Starting at Organic Gardening.

At the amazing nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange, a current forum topic offers some photos of how members start seeds under lights. You'll need to be able to raise the lights as the seedlings grow.

Heirloom seeds is offering a complete Victory Garden package -- 35 vegetables, some, such as lettuce beans, peppers and tomatoes, in several varieties, and 10 varieties of herbs -- comprising 76 seed packets for $95, of which $10 will go to the Red Cross. This could be shared among several families -- you'd need a lot of space to grow all of this. These are non-hybrid and untreated seeds.

Background:

N.Y. Times essay by Anne Raver on Roger Doiron, kitchen gardens, and how Eleanor Roosevelt grew peas and carrots on the White House lawn.

Farmer in Chief By MICHAEL POLLAN, N.Y. Times, Oct. 9, 2008.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your 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.

 Tags  gardens Obama seeds

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2 Comments

Green Zone said:

And President Obama wouldn't be the first to repurpose the lawn. President John Quincy Adams planted herbs and veggies at the White House. During WWI, First Lady Edith Wilson famously replaced the White House garden crew with a flock of sheep that grazed on the lawn.

Last year, I planted a "war garden" at Firehouse 13 in Providence, and my research on RI food gardens continues at http://greenzonegarden.wordpress.com/

Link | January 12, 2009 9:00 AM
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Derek Fell said:

In 1975 I designed a vegetable garden for Gerald Ford to plant at the White House, and I was appointed chairman of a committee with the responsibility of making it happen. Unfortunately, before the garden could be planted Ford had to focus on bringing the Viet Nam War to a conclusion. The changed circumstances meant that the planting a vegetable garden was seen as too frivolous. When Carter entered the White House he was also urged to plant a vegetable garden, but being a farmer he prefered to have his vp Walter Mondale plant it at his Washington residence, and it generated a lot of good publicity. My work at the White House is documented in my book titled THE WHITE HOUSE VEGETABLE GARDEN. It makes interesting reading because the USDA opposed the idea.

Link | March 17, 2009 2:55 PM
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