White House vegetable garden
It is a different kind of hoops at the White House, where President Obama regularly plays pick-up basketball with friends and aides.
Perhaps taking the advice from a young woman intern the Slow Food blog, the White House has put so-called hoop houses over the White House vegetable garden, to trap the heat of the sun and continue to grow crops all winter.
Emily Stephenson made the suggestion, and even included diagrams of how the hoop houses could best be installed.And, sure enough, the hoops when up and then the coverings went on. (Not the plastic that is ordinarily used, but a bio-friendly fabric.)
Eddie Gehman Kohan, who does such an excellent job of keeping track of such things on the blog Obama Foodorama, says the White House is growing lettuces, cabbage, winter radishes, onions, broccoli, turnips and carrots, which will only add to the harvest already calculated to be more than 1,000 pounds.The White House is located deep in Zone 7 so, barring terrible cold, the garden should remain warm, cozy and productive in its sunny spot on the South Lawn.
A hoop house is actually much larger that what the White House has installed, which might more correctly be called row covers. You can actually walk inside a real hoop house and tend plants on tables.
But these row covers can easily be flipped off for weeding, watering or harvesting.
Photos courtesy of Obama Foodorama
Categories: White House Vegetable Garden
Comments
BRAVO!!!!
Posted by: NotableM | December 9, 2009 1:51 PM
Great idea and neet looking "greenhouses"
Posted by: Kevin | December 11, 2009 11:21 AM
Your readers with late season herb and vegetable gardens may well find that they will grow more than they can use, preserve or give to friends.
They may want to visit www.AmpleHarvest.org - a site that helps diminish hunger by enabling backyard gardeners to share their crops with neighborhood food pantries.
The site is free both for the food pantries and the gardeners using it.
More than 1,200 food pantries nationwide are already on it and more are signing up daily.
It includes preferred delivery times, driving instructions to the pantry as well as (in many cases) information about store bought items also needed by the
pantry (for after the growing season).
AmpleHarvest.org enables people to help their community by reaching into their back yard instead of their back pocket.
Lastly, if your reader's community has a food pantry, they should make sure the pantry registers on www.AmpleHarvest.org. Its free.
Posted by: Gary | December 13, 2009 6:33 PM
Just as an FYI -- wanted to share with you some great work being done in Uganda with Project Disc (part of SlowFood Iternational) to help build gardens in schools to teach nutrition and the importance of vegetables. We visited nearly a dozen of their schools last week.
Here is the link on the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet Blog
How to Keep Kids Down on the Farm (1st in series)
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/how-to-keep-kids-%E2%80%9Ddown-on-the-farm%E2%80%9D/
Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack are also blogging from across East Africa on a website called Border Jumpers, check it out at https://www.borderjumpers.org
Posted by: Bernard Pollack | December 13, 2009 8:11 PM