What? Fresh Veggies at the White House?

Technorati Tags: Gardens,Gardening,Home,White House,Obama

I am sooo excited about this!  The White House is going to have a veggie garden on their South lawn!  What an excellent example for everyone!  It is quite sad when we see how little awareness the country as a whole has regarding environmental issues.  How miserable it is to hear people say things such as, "Nah...its all bluff!  There is NOTHING wrong with our environment." 

The truth is we have many issues to cover and going green is the best way for us to make an impact as individuals.  We expect others to come up with the solutions, implement them and make the changes we need four ourselves, our families and our future grandchildren and great grandchildren.  We don't get our hands dirty and do anything ourselves.  Well its time everyone took as stand, and this is precisely what the White house has decided to do.  And one way they are doing it is starting their own vegetable garden. 

As I was twittering today, (I LOVE Twitter!)  Someone twittered this link.  I was so excited about it I had to post it to my blog.  Hope you all are as happy about it as well.  Here is the post. (I'll also post the link)

 

White House Vegetable Garden Coming This Summer

Posted by: Peter Smith, March 7, 2009 at 9:00 am

Roger Doiron lives on less than half an acre in Scarborough, a suburb of Portland, Maine, that’s known less for its farms than its big-box stores. Last year, his front-yard kitchen garden was not just a source of inspiration and an estimated $2,400 in vegetables for his family; it was also a symbol of self-sufficiency and a greener suburbia. Doiron has also been petitioning the new president to put a Victory Garden on the White House. “If we were to have a first family to take this on and lead by example, we would see a ripple effect across the country and across the world,” he told the Washington Post.

Now, the Obama Administration appears to be heeding calls from Doiron and other gardening activists. This summer, they’re planning to plant a vegetable garden on the White House’s South Lawn , one adviser told CBS’s Political Hotsheet.

The effort has also led to questions about the broader implications of a Presidential kitchen garden. Warren Belasco, a food historian and author of Appetite for Change, said the action would be more of a symbolic boost for affluent activists rather than the people in need of healthy and inexpensive food, who were unlikely to have the time or space to benefit from the model garden on the White House lawn.

“Considering how far the community and organic gardening movement has come in the forty years since People’s Park put it on the map, do we still need symbolic stunts? I don’t think so,” he wrote. “Dig your own potatoes, people!”

Belasco and others have pointed to the efforts to reshape the USDA, such as its “People’s Garden,” a community garden project on the National Mall, especially given the agency’s resistance to such projects in the past. Now, if only Obama were to do something really radical in Washington D.C., it would be to reinstate the Center Market, the public market demolished to make way for the National Archives building, or to resume cattle grazing on the Ellipse.