Just Curious...

Come take a quick poll about the factor that will most influence your July 4 menu.

So, Did Your Governor Respond?

It's just a few more days until July 4th. Has your governor responded to the FoodIndependenceDay.org inquiry?

Here in Texas, we're still waiting to hear from Governor Perry. [UPDATE: We got an answer, via a Twitter-based video. I blogged a bit about it over at MySA.com ]

Over on the new, non-partisan Dig for Texas blog, I just posted this update:

Since neither Roger nor I have received any response from Governor Perry or his office yet, I've just tweeted to all the 2010 candidates (Democrat and Republican) for governor AND senate that I could find on Twitter, asking them what they'd serve on July 4. I swear it's NOT a trick question... we're just curious and want to spotlight local Texas food. Am hoping someone is willing to give an answer. A response from a Senate candidate would be terrific at this point, even if the project is geared at First Families!

As a reminder and for those of you coming late to the game, FoodIndependenceDay.org is a non-partisan project spearheaded by the same fella who engineered EatTheView.org during the 2008 presidential race.

In other words, this is not a "gotcha" activity. It's an honest inquiry.

If you're not sure if your First Family fessed up what's on the menu, then go look for the little red dots on the map. And if you haven't done so already, be sure to add your own green mark! You can be anonymous or you can use your name (and that's a big ol' hint for the candidates in any race out there--free advertising!)

Can This Victory Garden Be Saved?

You may recall a few months ago a link to an article here re: fate of the WWII-era Victory Garden that served as the home to the popular PBS show, "The Victory Garden," during the '80s and '90s. The latest word from Lexington, MA is that the garden's greenhouses could be bulldozed before the end of year. After a demolition delay by the town's historical commission expired in March, it appears to be largely up to the developers who purchased the property as to what happens with it... unless... well, read on:

According to Planning Director Maryann McCall-Taylor, the Planning Board still has an option to save the Victory Garden. State law says that once the board approves the final development plan, it has the option of reserving the property for public use. The town then has up to three years to buy the property; if the town decides not to, it can revert the property back to Homes Development Corp. or another developer, who has the possibility of selling it as one of its options. (Source)

The article suggests that the developer envisions maintaining the gardens as a focal point for the new homes.

Now, I have no plans to be a butt-insky on this matter and launch a petition to save the greenhouses, but I do wonder about the symbolism of this garden being converted from what was very public to private. At the same time, if the developers plays the cards right, we could have a cluster of homes showcasing a high-profile vegetable garden might spark press and copycats. That might even prove to be a good thing.

Your thoughts?

Leave a comment here or send a note via Twitter.

White House Garden Update

You can also read about EatTheView.org founder Roger Doiron in a new interview over at Seasonal Wisdom, one of my fave blogs.

Want more: check out the New York Times' The Caucus blog today.

Our Garden This Week

Our Central Texas Victory Garden 14 June 2009 from P.Price on Vimeo.

Lovely Li'l Morning Glory

I love morning glories--the real ones, not bindweed! This vine has cooked in the heat, but I was lucky enough to catch this bloom earlier in the year.

More non-Victory Garden pictures of our yard going up on RW&G's Facebook page this morning. Plus, tomorrow plan to check out a video update on our garden's progress.

The Queen Has an Allotment Garden Again

Friday Fun: Good Enough Gardening

The Good Enough gals invited me to chat a bit on their radio show. The episode's topic? Flowers.  Of course, we veered off into victory gardening and other things--all in good fun. Have a listen. (I come on near the end.)

Starting a Community Farmers Market

I found this new series by Heather Jones over at CookingUpAStory.com. She's starting a farmers market in rural New Jersey from scratch and chronicling the experience.

An excerpt:

Basically I’m doing it for purely selfish reasons, but not only that it would be a wonderful thing for my community, a way to put my town back on the map and get families to see the importance of supporting local agriculture and local businesses. My hometown like many small towns was a bustling little hub for a long time; we had our own bank, butcher, corner market, gas station, hotel, Movie Theater, etc. Then like many towns during the 70s and 80s we had a crime wave that brought drugs in and ripped the town and many families apart. The local business owners packed up what they had left and moved away, the school district fell apart, the town became one that many people became ashamed of living in. (More)

Two New Relevant Posts on My Other Two Blogs

Over at DigforTexas.com, we're trying to get Governor Perry and other local food fans to share their July 4 menus, as part of FoodIndependenceDay.org efforts. An excerpt:

While we wait to hear from the governor to respond, y'all are invited to weigh in with your July 4 menu ideas. Some suggestions that have already come in include Meyer's Elgin Smokehouse Sausages, Shiner Bock and Caprese salad with homegrown tomatoes, basil and Mozzarella Company cheese. (Too bad that Central Market's upcoming regional food promo doesn't start until later in the summer! (More)

From my post yesterday at MySA.com:

The kids are out of school, and the gardens are growing strong. Now is the perfect time to get creative and weave the garden into your family's life, perhaps learning a bit of history in the process.

Researching and discussing your family's gardening history offers a terrific opportunity to engage people of all ages in "bigger picture" discussions of sustainability. Older folks enjoy sharing their gardening memories, reflecting upon how they worked with their own parents to keep food on the table. Young people will likely find the challenge of finding creative means of archiving stories from their elders engaging. Everyone will benefit from exploring how what we grow at home sustains us, body and soul. (More)

FoodIndependenceDay.org

Remember EatTheView.org, which got us the White House garden? Well, founder Roger Doiron wants us to declare our "food independence" on July 4 and feature local foods in our homes while asking First Families to do the same.

If you have already signed on to the FoodIndependenceDay.org petition (on the web site or via Facebook), there are some other things that you can do:

• Forward a link to the site to your friends and family.
• Visit the site to put a little pin on the virtual map to show your support of local food.
• Check the virtual map to see if your state's First Family has shared their local food-centered menu with FoodIndependenceDay.org yet (look for a red pin). If they haven't, send 'em a note to email Roger (roger(at)kitchengardeners(dot)org). A handful of governors are on Twitter.
• Get your kids to participate in the "Why I'm a Victory Grower" contest.
• Put the cool widget on your site.

Oh, and for today's Twitter for Victory Garden (#twitter4vg) Tuesday, we'll be chatting up the FoodIndependenceDay.org effort. Watch the comments here.

Phillies' Ryan Howard Takes a Tour of the White House Garden

Be sure to check out the ending... you can see Mrs. Obama's prized bees!

A Taste of Gardening (University of Illinois Extension)

Just learned about this terrific web site, A Taste of Gardening, yesterday via Twitter. It's simple, elegant and easy to read. Wouldn't it be marvelous if every state extension office put a site together like this? I couldn't find anything similar over at the Texas AgriLife Extension Service, but then maybe I didn't look hard enough? The Texas Home Vegetable Guide comes close but seems flat in comparison, seeing as it's a PDF.  (That said, I did go ahead and add a link to it over at DigforTexas.com.)

To me, the Illinois site reads very much like the old victory garden brochures distributed by local government agencies and businesses. No wonder. According to one of my Twitter followers, Ron Wolford (@urbangarden), the site is based on an '80s brochure developed to promote urban gardening in Chicago. Wolford sent me this link, too, which includes a bit of background of federally funded urban gardening programs in the late '70s/early '80s. 

Expect more of these "virtual" brochures to come as part of Victory Gardens 3.0. Because as they say, everything old is new again. Eventually.

Readers: Do you know of something similar in your state? Feel free to add a link! 

Thinking Out Loud: Charrettes for Victory?

Earlier tonight, I decided to check  in on the weekly sustainable agriculture chat (#sustagchat) on Twitter. Just as I hopped on, I found this tweet from @sustagchat:

Are there any new/experimental ideas you want to try in your community to engage on food issues? #sustagchat

For some reason, I wrote this in response automatically:

RE: question about ideas, I'd love to see food system charettes [SIC] http://budurl.com/mkgf #twitter4vg #digforTX #sustagchat

Funny, but I haven't thought of charrettes much in some time, not since my Louisiana days. Generally speaking--and per Wikipedia, charrettes are defined as:

... any collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem. While the structure of a charrette varies, depending on the design problem and the individuals in the group, charrettes often take place in multiple sessions in which the group divides into sub-groups. Each sub-group then presents its work to the full group as material for future dialogue. Such charrettes serve as a way of quickly generating a design solution while integrating the aptitudes and interests of a diverse group of people. Compare this term with workshop. (More)

It was in Louisiana that I first encountered the charrette notion through my loose affiliation with a group called Plan Baton Rouge. Several years ago, city and community leaders hired the acclaimed Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company architectural firm to facilitate the creation of a new blueprint for the then-declining downtown Baton Rouge. To witness the phenomenal success of Baton Rouge's charrette-based planning process thus far, take a look at the Downtown Development District's site.

Where am I going with this post? Well, I'd like to invite you to puzzle through with me what a "food system charrette" at the local level might look like and include. I think they could be a useful way to move important discussions into the hearts and minds of our communities. 

Beginning with the end in mind, here is a list of possible desired outcomes: 

• A new, public master plan designed to enhance and protect the regional/local food system

• Enhanced awareness of all parties about the food system's current state of health and potential threats to safety and security

• Creation of a local/regional food system map and historical archive in which all stakeholders' stories would be valued (This can be a wonderful point of reference and possible teaching tool if schools are involved in post-charrette efforts. And, frankly, they should be included!)

• Identification of weakest links (or, golden opportunities) for community-driven response to food insecurity, food safety

• An inventory of open spaces that may be cultivated to instruct and/or serve needy; also, an inventory of spaces and/or services that can shore up food security (ex. county/parish extension-based courses on food cultivation; "hire a farmer" landscape businesses; CSAs; a list of church kitchens that can be used for community-based food preservation efforts)

Some obvious guidelines: 

• The discussion would need to be held in a neutral public space.

• Trained, impartial facilitators would need to be on hand to lead the discussion.

• Ample time (read: several days) would need to be allocated to allow for all stakeholders to share their perspectives. (This would include everyone from home gardeners to farmers to, yes, big Ag folks when appropriate; other representatives might include food banks, church groups, etcetera.)

Those are my initial thoughts which I hope will lead to another post or two here or elsewhere, possibly at MySA.com. Now, in keeping with spirit of collaboration central to charrettes, what have you got in mind?

Explore more:

• National Charrette Institute - See especially the page on Charrettes for Sustainability Planning and The Charrette System as An Agent for Change

Food for Thought: Seth Godin on Tribes

How the victory/kitchen garden idea really spread, will continue to spread... through tribes. 

Dig for Texas Launch Day!

The first two posts are up over at DigforTexas.com. Go over and have a look. Oh, and if you're a Texas blogger, you can register there--and have a shot at a groovy pair of Ethel Gloves.

The plan is for us to roll out a new post each week. We have some ideas in mind for things we'd like to see happen online and out in our communities, but we're really hoping to start the ball rolling with a conversation. I'm very excited to see what the three of us can do to encourage edible landscapes in Texas, with the successful Eat The View initiative serving as a touchstone. Wish us luck!

Personally, after a year of kicking the tires on the evolution of American victory gardening and coming to the stark realization that regional approaches are important to the long-term success of the modern movement, I expect to dedicate a fair a bit of time to tending Dig for Texas. This may mean that RW&G gets neglected a little more, but that's okay. Blogs evolve, just like people.

Finally, a special note of thanks to Roger Doiron and Patty Bakerr for the encouragement and moral support!

On the Shelf: Defiant Gardens

I stumbled across Kenneth I. Helphand's Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (Trinity U. Press) at the library this week. It was shelved among the garden books, in plain site... like it was meant to be discovered. Funny, too, that it was published here in San Antonio.

Thanks to Google, I found the book's website, which offers excerpts such as this:

. . . This book, however, looks at those created in extreme situations—defiant gardens. Such gardens stand not in harmony with but in opposition to their locations, asserting their presence and almost demanding response from their human visitors. . . .My focus is on defiant gardens created during wartime. . . These gardens offer evidence of the profound meanings contained in the experience of gardens. These are all extreme situations, but there are lessons and ideas to be gleaned from these places that apply to garden making in more benign conditions....

Studying the intersection of gardens and war yields great rewards of understanding about humanity and about nature. Life, home, work, hope, and beauty are five attributes that lie dormant in all gardens, awaiting the catalyst that propels them to germinate and allowing us to recognize them as defiant gardens. These gardens can be of any scale, their life spans vary from that of a window box to a valley, and they may be real or imagined.

This seems intriguing, too--from the book jacket:

Proving that gardens are far more than peaceful respites from the outside world, Defiant Gardens is a thought-provoking anaylsis of why people build and work in gardens.... Informative and inspirational, this history of gardens during wartime documents how gardens have humanized landscapes and experience, even under the most dire conditions.

I'll let you know what I think of it when I'm finished.