[Homestead] A white House garden

Lynn Wigglesworth lynnw1366 at hotmail.com
Wed Jan 7 10:06:38 EST 2009


Sounds like a waste to me. If Obama were to have a garden, he'd probably 
form a committee to decide what to grow, and hire someone at a high salary 
to weed it. A garden has to be someone's personal passion or it doesn't 
work, and he doesn't strike me as the gardening type.

Lynn Wigglesworth
Tioga Co. PA
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "bobf" <bobford79 at yahoo.com>
To: <homestead at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 8:56 AM
Subject: [Homestead] A white House garden


> >From this am Wash Post.  Personally, I am unsure of the importance or 
> >effectiveness of a symbolic act like a garden at thwe White House.  But, 
> >someone on the list, maybe Lynn?, brought it up a while back .  I suppose 
> >it wouldn't hurt and if they use it for 'teaching', maybe it might 
> >help.............
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On the Road For Change
> The Goal: A Farm At the White House
>
>
> By Jane Black
>
> Washington Post Staff Writer
>
> Wednesday, January 7, 2009; Page F01
>
> Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow didn't really have a plan when 
> they set off on a cross-country drive in a topsy-turvy school bus with 
> herbs, greens and root vegetables planted on the roof. But they didn't 
> think they needed one. Their cause seemed so pure, so obviously righteous: 
> to persuade the next president of the United States to grow food on the 
> White House lawn.
>
> But that was August. The days were bright and hot. And the only obstacle 
> to an abundance of spinach and Swiss chard were 60-mph headwinds and 
> highway fumes. In December, it was a different story. On one day when they 
> were parked at the edge of Penn Quarter's Thursday farmers market, sheets 
> of rain lashed the bus. It was too cold to sleep in the bus, too cold to 
> grow anything on the roof, too miserable for anyone to stop and sign the 
> White House Organic Farm (WHO Farm) petition.
>
> Simon and Gustowarow have traveled through 25 states and collected 10,000 
> signatures. But they've yet to hear whether President-elect Barack Obama 
> will consent to transform the South Lawn into a working farm.
>
> Simon, 28, and Gustowarow, 27, aren't the first, or the most famous, to 
> lobby for a White House garden. The idea became a cause celebre for food 
> lovers during the presidential election campaign. Chez Panisse chef-owner 
> Alice Waters and author Michael Pollan, gods of the sustainable-food 
> movement, called on the new president to plant organic fruits and 
> vegetables to feed the first family and stock local food pantries. In 
> February, Maine gardener Roger Doiron launched an online campaign, dubbed 
> Eat the View, with the same goal. Advocates say a first family garden 
> could set an example for millions of Americans and, by promoting 
> sustainable food, help tackle the awesome challenges of climate change, 
> food safety and energy conservation.
>
> The pair have made great sacrifices for the cause. Gustowarow left his job 
> on a farm near Annapolis to make the cross-country journey. Simon paid 
> $42,000 for a yellow school bus with half of another bus welded upside 
> down on its top. Topsy Turvy, as the bus is known, was owned by Ben Cohen 
> of Ben and Jerry's fame, who had it purpose-built to demonstrate what he 
> saw as the country's upside-down budget priorities. The pair's 
> four-month-long, 11,000-mile journey coincided with record prices at the 
> gas pump -- and the bus averages only seven or eight miles to the gallon. 
> "I'm in a lot of debt," Simon shrugs. "But it's what I'm excited about."
>
> In a time of war and recession, a garden might not be at the top of the 
> executive agenda. And it's not clear whether Simon and Gustowarow can put 
> it there. They have little in common with many of the ambitious staffers 
> who come to Washington. They're dreamers: soft-spoken, humble and more 
> interested in their cause than in connections.
>
> The friends met in 2003 while working in the Philippines for the Peace 
> Corps. After returning home, Gustowarow went to work on a farm; Simon went 
> to New York to help develop green roof projects.
>
> In February, Simon attended a conference at Harvard University. There, 
> Waters was honored and gave a speech in which she said that her two dreams 
> were to create gardens at schools across the country and to see food grown 
> on the White House lawn, as it had been in the past. Simon was inspired: 
> "I thought, this is an idea that deserves a grassroots movement. Alice 
> Waters is someone who deserves to have her dreams come true."
>
> Before setting off on their journey the pair contacted Waters, who blessed 
> the venture. They set up a platform bed in the back of the bus, decked the 
> ceiling with American flags and stocked the "kitchen" shelves with spices, 
> oil, grains and ready-made soup. They planted herbs and root crops in 
> lightweight soil on the roof, and on Aug. 4 they set off from New York to 
> San Francisco. They had three weeks to make it to Slow Food Nation, the 
> country's largest food festival, held on Labor Day weekend.
>
> There, Simon and Gustowarow parked the bus alongside the "victory garden" 
> planted in front of San Francisco's City Hall, where they solicited 
> signatures from thousands of like-minded food lovers. Pollan came aboard 
> the bus for a chat. The pair even drove to Berkeley for lunch with Waters 
> at Chez Panisse. They don't remember what they ate; "she picked the menu," 
> Gustowarow says.
>
>>From there, they traveled organically across the South. Simon says they 
>>set their sights on places "where we would be preaching to the choir, then 
>>seeing where the choir led us." They visited schools in Oakland and 
>>Berkeley. In Arizona, they stopped in Flagstaff and Sedona, where they 
>>drove out to Republican presidential nominee John McCain's ranch, only to 
>>be shooed away by the Secret Service.
>
> In Lubbock, Texas, they hooked up with cheesemaker Nancy Patton of Haute 
> Goat Creamery. "I was having drinks with my father at the retirement 
> village when the phone rang, and this kid told me he was driving across 
> the country in an upside-down school bus. The first thing I'm thinking is, 
> 'How did you get my number?' "
>
>
>
> Daniel Bowman Simon paid $42,000 for the bus that made the 11,000-mile 
> journey. "I'm in a lot of debt," he says. "But it's what I'm excited 
> about." (Dominic Bracco II - for The Washington Post)
>
> Crops were planted in lightweight soil on the top of the traveling bus. 
> (Dominic Bracco II - for The Washington Post)
>
>
> Patton, a self-described conservative Republican, was impressed, however. 
> "I thought it was a different stop for someone to pitch a cause like that. 
> We're pretty cowboy here," she says. Patton put out a local press release 
> and booked Simon and Gustowarow on the local Fox morning news program. 
> Then she called a friend and asked him to design some T-shirts for them.
>
> "My approach is a little different than theirs," she says. "But I just 
> appreciate what they are doing. My question is: Who would be against 
> this?"
>
> Good question. There is a history of agriculture at the White House. Its 
> first tenant, John Adams, planted a garden shortly after taking up 
> residence in 1800. Woodrow Wilson brought in sheep to mow and fertilize 
> the White House lawn in 1918, an effort to conserve resources for the war 
> effort. In 1943, over the objection of the Agriculture Department, Eleanor 
> Roosevelt planted a victory garden, inspiring millions of Americans to 
> grow their own food.
>
> Since then, however, only herbs have been grown at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. 
> Jimmy Carter, a Georgia farmer who extolled the virtues of gardening 
> during his campaign, declined calls in 1978 to plant a vegetable garden at 
> the White House. The issue has not been raised again seriously until now.
>
> The WHO Farm petition goes further than other similar calls to action. 
> Simon and Gustowarow want schoolchildren and disabled Americans to work in 
> the White House garden, a request that might pose a tricky security 
> challenge. (Simon says including more participants in the project will 
> make it more viable.) They also ask, among other things, that the 
> gardeners plant heirloom seeds and use compost made from food waste from 
> the kitchens that serve the White House, congressional buildings and 
> Supreme Court.
>
> He and Gustowarow plan to upload their petition to http://www.change.gov, 
> the Obama-Biden transition Web site, before the inauguration, then send it 
> to the White House by mail. (The petition will remain open, Simon says, 
> until there is a garden on the White House lawn. It can be signed at 
> http://www.thewhofarm.org.)
>
> In the new year, Gustowarow is hoping to find a piece of land to farm. 
> Simon will continue on his quest. "I'm not terribly optimistic this will 
> happen the day [the Obamas] move into the White House," Simon says. "I 
> think we've planted a seed -- no pun intended -- that opens up the 
> possibility."
>
> Coming tomorrow: Adrian Higgins contemplates what a White House vegetable 
> garden might entail, in the Home section.
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/06/AR2009010600523.html?hpid=smartliving
>
>
>
>
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