Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House

Would you like to be like the first family? Time to plant a garden, or better yet, if you're not the green thumb type, have a local business do it for you...Green City Growers of course!

By MARIAN BURROS

Published: March 19, 2009

WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of the South Lawn on Friday to plant a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets — the president does not like them — but arugula will make the cut.

Sam Kass, an assistant White House chef, left, and Dale Haney, the White House gardener, at the site of the new vegetable garden on the South Lawn.

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 a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern.

“My hope,” the first lady said in an interview in her East Wing office, “is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”

Read on here...

Ten Reasons to Own a Backyard Farm

1. Locally Grown Food Tastes Better - You can taste the difference. Fresh food simply tastes better. As Julia Child put it, “You don’t have cook fancy or complicated masterpieces-just good food from fresh ingredients.”

2. Local Produce is Better for You - The fresher the produce, the more nutrients it retains. Food picked right from the ground and eaten will be healthier for you than food that has traveled thousands of miles just to sit at the market. Supermarket produce can spend up to fourteen days in transit.

3. Backyard Farms can Cost Less than the Supermarket - On average, a 4-person family spends around $60 a week on organic produce at the market. A backyard farm costs around 20% less for even fresher, chemical-free vegetables that haven’t been packaged and shipped from all over the world. Your farm will cost about the same as buying chemically-treated produce from the supermarket, except with exponentially greater benefits for the environment, community, and your health.

4.You Know Where your Food is Coming From - We use ethical, chemical-free techniques to keep your backyard flourishing. An average piece of food will touch at least 6 set of hands before reaching your table. Food from your yard is solely a relationship between you, your farmer, and the earth. With all the current health and food safety issues, the less hands touching your food the better.

5. Backyard Farms make a Lighter Carbon Footprint - On average, food travels 1,500 miles from the farm to your dinner table. Every calorie of food eaten requires ten times the fossil fuel to produce, distribute, travel, and refrigerate. Eating from your yard not only bypasses this energy waste but also reduces harmful emissions from the chemicals and pesticides used to accelerate plant growth and extend shelf life.

6. Local Foods have more Variety- In the modern industrial agricultural system, produce varieties are selected for their tough skin in order to survive packaging and shipping, and preserve longer. This limits the genetic diversity of plants being grown and sold at the market, eliminating our access to original flavors and overall freshness. Food from your yard isn’t limited by genetic selection, and allows for a wide variety of heirloom, micro, and a-typical vegetable varieties that taste distinctly different and fresher than what you can typically find at the supermarket.

7. Guaranteed Natural- Bio-engineered food can lose some of the natural antioxidants and nutrition that organic or naturally created produce will always contain. Industrially grown produce is often treated using chemicals that we then ingest. Your seeds will never be genetically modified, or produce treated with chemicals, as nature intended.

8. Support your Local Farmer! Shake his hand. Your relationship with your farmer is as direct as it gets. Open your back door and say hello…or help them harvest fresh food from your farm. Supporting Green City Growers will help create local jobs and allow us the means to give back to the community.

9. Backyard Farms Build a Stronger Community. Recipe exchanges, food drives, and a variety of community-based relationships will develop from owning a backyard farm. Donate excess veggies or create a produce exchange with your neighbors.

10. A Backyard Farm is an Investment in Your Future. Controlling your food source, learning from it, and teaching your children and neighbors how to be more self-sustainable is good for everyone involved. With a little work, sun, and water, your backyard farm will always produce food, a basic necessity, regardless of the economy.

GCG Urban Intensive Workshop

If you are interested in learning the skills that we are using to transform Boston into a Green City, join us April 25th for our hands-on full day Urban Intensive Growing Workshop. We will be exploring the principles of Urban Sustainability, and will be getting our hands dirty transforming an urban yard over the course of the day. Through discussion, games, and good old fashioned hard work, we will cover:

Site Design, Composting/Worm Composting, Organic Remediation Methods, Micro Farming, Market Gardening, Square Foot Gardening, Micro Livestock, Urban Homesteading, Four Season Harvest, Natural Building, Urban farmer’s treasure hunt

Lunch (Vegan friendly) will be provided

This Workshop will be held in the heart of Jamaica Plain at the HeartBeat Collective house.

$90 payable in advance, $110 at the door

EMAIL US if you are interested in attending...

It Comes from the President's Wife, it MUST be true

Torn from the virtual pages of the NYTimes.

When you have your bounty from the Green City Growers Garden, you will have the opportunity to share with your neighbors, friends, and those less fortunate.

It's all about the food.

WASHINGTON

THE television cameras were rolling, the journalists were scribbling and the first lady, Michelle Obama, was standing in a soup kitchen rhapsodizing about steamed broccoli. And homemade mushroom risotto. And freshly baked apple-carrot muffins.

Mrs. Obama was praising the menu last week at Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit drop-in center serving this city’s homeless. And she seized the moment to urge Americans to provide fresh, unprocessed and locally grown foods to their families and to the neediest in their communities.

“You know, we want to make sure our guests here and across the nation are eating nutritious items,” said Mrs. Obama, who served lunch to several homeless men and women and delivered eight cases of fresh fruit to the soup kitchen, all donated by White House employees.

“Collect some fruits and vegetables; bring by some good healthy food,” she said. “We can provide this kind of healthy food for communities across the country, and we can do it by each of us lending a hand.”

In her first weeks in the White House, Mrs. Obama has emerged as a champion of healthy food and healthy living. She has praised community vegetable gardens, opened up her own kitchen to show off the White House chefs’ prowess with vegetables and told stories about feeding less fattening foods to her daughters.

White House officials say the focus on healthy living will be a significant item on Mrs. Obama’s agenda, which already includes supporting working families and military spouses. As the nation battles an obesity epidemic and a hard-to-break taste for oversweetened and oversalted dishes, her message is clear: Fresh, nutritious foods are not delicacies to be savored by the wealthy, but critical components of the diets of ordinary and struggling families.

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EVENT Tonight

Reminder:

Tonight @ 7pm:

Urban Sustainability Series: Growing Container and Urban Plots

Tuesday, 3 March 2009
7:00pm to 9:00pm
6 Eliot st Jamaica Plain

The first is our Urban Sustainability Series, this workshop will explore many options for growing your own food in the city. From container gardening to raised-beds, Gabriel Erde-Cohen of Green City Growers will share basic skills and tips to help you grow the most local food possible - directly from your front yard, porch, or windowsill!

We will explore:
Easy raised bed construction
Site selection for containers, pots and raised beds
Choosing between container gardens and raised-bed gardens
Deciding what plants to grow and where
Come with your questions about growing food in a container and/or small garden setting, and share your insights with fellow JP green-thumbs.