WHO? White House Organics, That's W.H.O.

Eat the view! Buy virtual pieces of the White House lawn! Roger the Gardener vs. Joe the Plumber! And now The Who Farm!

Introducing Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow, primary "WhoFarmers", two guys who are joining others in petitioning the White House to use some of its vast waste of a lawn to grow organic food.

Their petition is full of heartfelt recommendations to the Farmer In Chief-elect:

We, the people, respectfully request that an organic farm be planted on the grounds of The White House, at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC.

The White House Organic Farm (aka TheWhoFarm) will be a model for healthy, economical and sustainable living everywhere. It will serve as an educational tool and economic aid, and as a means to provide food security in the Nation's Capitol. It will reconnect the Office of the Presidency to the self-sufficient agricultural roots of America's Founding Fathers.

The White House Organic Farm Recipe

Article I: The Farmers
Public school children and Americans with disabilities will work The White House Organic Farm, to set an example for the world of hands-on learning and will foster an independent, do-it-yourself work ethic.

Article II: The Eaters
The White House Organic Farm's harvest will provide fresh food for the President, the President's family, and the President's distinguished guests. Just as importantly, it will also supply healthy food to public school lunch programs and food pantries in Washington, DC.

Article III: The Delivery
Food from The White House Organic Farm will be delivered to local public schools and food pantries by volunteers on foot and by bicycle, at a net-zero cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Article IV: The Seeds
The White House organic farmers will plant a diverse mix of heirloom seeds passed down from Thomas Jefferson's farm at Monticello and seeds donated by American farmers and gardeners, to celebrate both the rich agricultural traditions of the Office of the President and the passions of everyday Americans for working her fertile and bountiful land.

Article V: The Soil
The White House Organic Farm will use healthy topsoil, nourished by compost supplements from yard and food waste from all three branches of the federal government; from The White House, from The United States Capitol, and from The United States Supreme Court.

11:12 AM ET | 11-20-2008 | permalink

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The Platform Of The Garden Party

Who says there's no platform for gardeners as the prevailing winds whip this country intro frenzy?

Kitchen Gardeners International -- a non-profit founded in Maine 8 yrs ago by a gent named Roger Doiron -- has hooked up with eBay to sell virtual plots of the First Lawn. Why? After repeated readings of its press material, I see it's a fund-raising campaign for KGI programs, a call to turn front lawns into kitchen gardens, and a way to galvanize interest in convincing the next president to grow food on the underused, over-preened White House lawn.

Roger Doiron, founder of the Maine-based Kitchen Gardeners International, is using this cheeky campaign to petition our next president for a quarter-acre garden on the White House lawn.

photo credit: Eat The View

 

I fear the campaign suffers from confusion. We've got the virtual lawn sale, the Eat the View petition plus the challenge of interacting with eBay if that's not something you ordinarily do.

But at heart, no gardener will argue with KGI's mission statement, "to achieve greater levels of food self-reliance through the promotion of kitchen gardening, home-cooking, and sustainable local food systems".

Besides, if you're feeling disenfranchised as a green thumb voter, here's a place to put your muscle, your shovel and your vote.

As far as the precedent of growing veges on the big house's turf, the last time it was dug up and planted was in 1943, when victory gardener Eleanor Roosevelt grew carrots and beans. Here's a juicy article on the subject by the well-known victory gardener, Barbara Damrosch.

Check out a video after the jump...

Continue reading "The Platform Of The Garden Party" »

11:16 AM ET | 09- 5-2008 | permalink

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No Stump Speech, Just Stump Me

One of the on-going discussion groups at the Talking Plant Flickr site has focused on that age-old gardening question, "What the hell is that plant?". Thanks to the page's moderator and TP's best friend Andy Carvin, we've had some interesting species pop up for identification now and again.

TP flickr member Live Now posted this to the stumped page to see what might turn up. The answer, with help from Mike in Oregon: the fluffy seedheads from our native western pasqueflower, Anemone occidentalis. Isn't it a hoot? The mountain in the background is the ever-spectacular Mt. Rainier, which I will go to my grave never being able to pronounce.

photo credit: Live Now

 

I expect you'll be seeing a lot more peculiar seed heads, fruits and unusual late-blooming flowers -- or perhaps you've got a file of stuff you're still wondering about -- in which case, consider this an invitation to post your unidenfied flora and if I can't figure it out, no doubt one of our community can.

You can either post your pix here (with a few useful hints, please!, like location and season pix was taken) or send me an e-mail with jpg attached and again, as much info as you can recall.

OFFER IS LIMITED, PLANT GEEKS STANDING BY...

11:26 AM ET | 08-27-2008 | permalink

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Eat Your Words

It all started with this quote:

Let my words, like vegetables, be tender and sweet, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.

Looking for some attribution a bit more satisfying than "Anonymous," I started wandering far and near, until I ended up visiting the Yorkshire, England, home of the online-only World Carrot Museum.

I offer this destination to all you gardeners who are finding the weather joyless and the summer garden desolate (Hello, Austin!) hoping you will find some joy in the exhibit Carrots in Literature (from Shakespeare to Shel Silverstein) or if not there, perhaps in the idiosyncratic gallery featuring Carrots in Works of Art.

Carrots are the new biscuits in our house, a recent if not entirely welcome switch after I got fed up feeding the beagle ludicrously expensive treats she invariably inhaled without so much of a thanks.

photo credit: Ketzel Levine, NPR

 

For further pseudo-gardening inspiration, check out the recently unveiled Urban Trees 5 exhibit now standing fanciful and bizarre along the San Diego North Embarcadaro (click on the first thumbnail and scroll on through). Here's some background on this on-going Port of San Diego public arts project.

9:00 PM ET | 08-13-2008 | permalink

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Radical Front Yard Gardener Throws in the Towel

Lest you think all do-good gardeners suffer from eco-hubris, don't miss the latest entry by D.C. gardener Susan Harris over at our friends' place, Garden Rant.

Having removed her front lawn with valiant determination, intent on growing her own food, Susan quickly realized "that my front yard - that most visible of spaces - would look like crap for most of the year, and I suddenly lost heart".

She then switched to a savvy hodge-podge of low-growing ornamentals.

No doubt I particularly love her blog post because I'm constantly having to defend my decision to have an ornamental-only garden. Never mind that I don't cook; people just seem so disappointed that I don't graze in my own garden and grow my own food.

Morally disappointed, that is.

But I do graze! For the two weeks it's in flower, I eat the sugary sweet petals off my pineapple guava. I also steal into my beloved neighbors' lawn-dominated garden and gobble down the raspberries growing along their fence.

Then I stuff my pockets full of cash, head to any number of Portland's farmer's markets, and like a great humanitarian lavish my wages on our hard-working local growers.

The market economy welcomes you back, Susan!

9:26 AM ET | 07- 9-2008 | permalink

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Pissing Rain and Standing Water

Having just heard NPR's Melissa Block report on the desperation after the quake in Chengdu, and the continuing absurdity of foreign aid not getting into Myanmar, I'm torn as always between talking plants and talking real life.

Right now I've decided they're not mutually exclusive.

Even as eyewitnesses text, phone and e-mail in accounts from China, native lewisias in the Columbia Gorge are pushing from bud to flower absorbing whatever sun's rays are available (all told, not much); the first ruellia and acanthus flowers have been spotted by an Austin blogger; and a U.K. gardener mourns the absence of bad weather as he heads into the region's biggest flower show of the year.

Thanks for the much-needed visits to Zanthan Gardens and Blackpitts Garden; your blog recommendations enabled me to pick today's small if desperately-needed bouquet.

2:00 PM ET | 05-12-2008 | permalink

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Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

Paul Zindel wrote the play, Paul Newman directed the movie and it looks like the European Space Agency is now going to show us how to grow marigolds on the moon.

The BBC reports:

A team led by Natasha Kozyrovska and Iryna Zaetz from the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev planted marigolds in crushed anorthosite, a type of rock found on Earth which is very similar to much of the lunar surface.

Wouldn't have spied this if not for our own Greg, who turned me on to http://pruned.blogspot.com/ which mixes plants with science, landscape architecture, environmental issues, all the juicy and provocative stuff. Check it out!

11:35 AM ET | 04-30-2008 | permalink

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Doyenne of Dirt Comes Clean

Consider me humbled.

You may have noticed I'm not the hippest blogster in the bunch. In other words, if it's hot and happening in the blog world, you're NOT likely to read about it here.

Believe me, I'm not bragging. I get that my creds as a blogger are slightly pathetic, possibly even considered rude, if the standard of gentility is linking to others.

So consider me a plant in need of sunlight and nourishment and help me out here. What are the enlightening, surprising, irreverent and relevant plant-related blogs I need to read?

12:02 PM ET | 04-25-2008 | permalink

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Wanna Garden Online?

I've lost about 20 minutes trying to figure out why I'd want to do this and how to describe what it is to you and am bleary eyed from the effort. From what I can gather, it's a site where you can enter data about everything you're growing, track it, share it, picture it...all the kinds of things I don't like to do. But you might, so check out myfolia and let us know if it's useful to you.

By the way, I read about it at GardenPunks, a site I stopped by because -- being well past my own punk years -- I wanted to see what a 21st century punk was.

Answer: EcoPunk.

2:35 AM ET | 12-19-2007 | permalink

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