A Bit About WorldFoodGarden.Org (Guest Blogger Eve Sibley)

Yesterday, activist Eve Sibley filled us in on her trip to Slow Food Nation. Today she guest blogs and again to introduce us to her new garden-themed project:

Here's a little about the site I've been working on: World Food Garden (www.worldfoodgarden.org). It's a networking site and organizing tool specifically for gardeners and philanthropic individuals. It contains a world map of small food gardens. Each garden is represented on a map by a cartoon carrot which links to that garden's larger profile. The carrots are color coded for individual gardens, community gardens, school gardens, CSAs, small farms, non-genetically modified (GMO) seed suppliers. Any gardener of the above types of gardens is welcome to add a carrot to the World Map of Small Food Gardens and to create a free profile, blog, planting schedule, and network.

The ultimate goal of the site is to empower current gardeners with new tools and to encourage new gardeners to start gardens. The site will soon have tutorials on different methods of growing, container vs. in-ground gardens, as well as a "garden calculator" that provides planting times and seed variety suggestions based upon the person's longitude and latitude. Another special thing we are working on offering is a easily searchable database of every type of non-GMO seed variety in the USA.

The map will be highly searchable allowing users the ability to highlight gardens that are related specifically to their search criteria. For example, one person may choose to see only all rooftop gardens of the world. Or another user may choose to see only the biodynamic gardens whose gardener is willing to be a "garden mentor" (someone willing to answer garden questions to newbies.) Another user may choose to search the map for all gardens that are affiliated with a specific organization, ect.

At Slow Food Nation, my friend and I passed out small cards which read "WorldFoodGarden.Org, one world map of small food gardens, put your garden on the map!" We talked to a ton of people in the 2 short days we were in San Francisco, and the response was great. The majority of people we spoke with did have gardens at home, even if only a pot of herbs. And quite a few gardens have since been added to the WFG map, including one in Israel! One man I approached said that he actually didn't have a garden but that he was there covering the event for Wired Magazine and ended up doing a short interview with me you can see here. Feeling a little camera shy, I hid behind my visor and glasses.

Thanks for reading, thanks for growing, and I hope you will showcase what you've been growing on the World Food Garden map!

Eve