It’s clear that the time for growing food through community is here and cities across California are joining efforts to save water, unite neighborhoods, and build a strong movement for local food production. The Victory Garden Foundation in Oakland aims to match Sonoma County’s Challenge and install 350 gardens over the same weekend in May. In Santa Monica, the third annual 100 Garden Challenge, pioneered by Gardens of Gratitude, will take place April 24 and 25.

“Sonoma County’s 350 Garden Challenge seeks to inspire our citizens to create a healthy, homegrown food supply, save water and cut greenhouse gas emissions,” said Trathen Heckman, Director of Daily Acts, a Petaluma-based nonprofit that provides education about greywater, home food production, and a range of sustainable living skills.

Key projects to be undertaken over the weekend include:

On the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, April 22, 20 members of the U.S. Coast Guard will revitalize a garden at Burbank Heights Apartments in Sebastopol; community members will plant this garden on May 15 and 16.

Green Sangha, a nonprofit group of environmental activists, will install a model garden at Community Market natural foods store near Santa Rosa Junior College. Wine barrels, plants, and soil will be distributed to the nonprofit community organization Nuestra Voz to install container gardens at 60 households at Spring Village, a low-income housing complex in Boyes Hot Springs.

The 350 Garden Challenge initiative, which also seeks to educate and empower community and support local businesses, is a collaboration of Daily Acts, iGROW Sonoma, GoLocal, and Living Mandala, in conjunction with the Sonoma County Water Agency (SCWA) and dozens of other community groups and companies. SCWA, in turn, has provided a generous $25,000 matching grant for this project.

Want to get involved? Join the 350 Challenge Facebook page. Garden sites and participation is being coordinated online and in individual community meetings and events. Get ready to dig in!

Thanks to Michelle Obama, there is finally going to be a bona fide – and fairly expansive – organic fruit and vegetable garden at the White House!

Apparently, President Obama doesn’t favor beets, but the first family and their guests will be dining on a reported 55 other varieties of vegetables, plus berries for dessert, throughout the year. The herb patch is going to include anise hyssop (aka licorice mint), which, if you happen to be lucky enough to have any in your garden, you know is a huge favorite of bees – and there will be a couple of First Hives nearby.  The White House also made known that the seeds and equipment to start their Victory Garden cost a total of $200, a sum which pales in comparison to the produce the garden could yield.  White House gardener Dale Haney, along with the team in the kitchen (Sam Kass, Cristeta Comerford and Bill Yosses) will be tending to the garden. Michelle Obama insists that everyone will help pull weeds, “whether they like it or not.”  And the DC fifth-graders, who are helping break ground on this first day of spring and have a garden of their own at their school, will help plant, harvest and cook the cilantro, tomatilloes, hot peppers, red romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and galactic lettuces, and the spinach, chard, collards and black kale.

And then the words many people have been hoping for and waiting a long time to hear:

“I wanted to be able to bring what I learned to a broader base of people. And what better way to do it than to plant a vegetable garden in the South Lawn of the White House.”

While the groundbreaking on the South Lawn takes place today, there’ll be a more formal unveiling ceremony for the Obamas’ edible garden in June – just in time for fresh picks.

Here is the garden’s plan, from the New York Times:

Photo: First Lady Michelle Obama works with kids from Washington’s Bancroft Elementary School to break ground for a White House garden. The White House / Joyce N. Boghosian

For those of you who’ve spent the last year living in a cave, environmentalists and food fighters have been talking incessantly about pushing our next president to plant a garden on the White House lawn. But this is not just so that Obama has an endless supply of arugula.

The Eat the View campaign is the brainchild of Roger Doiron, an organic gardener from Scarborough, Maine.  His hope was that a Victory Garden, like the one that Eleanor Roosevelt famously kept at the White House, would bring awareness to our food miles, encourage eaters to grow some of their own food by example, and show solidarity with farmers, as well as feeding the first family economically and sustainably.

The campaign quickly grew to over 20,000 supporters through an online petition, and garnered notice from the Washington Post, the New York Times and National Public Radio.  Most recently, the concept even won a contest on the site On Day One, which entitles the idea to be presented to President Obama.  Two times a charm?  It is also in the running for a contest on Change.org, and the winner’s idea will be presented to the Obama administration on January 16th at an event at the National Press Club.  The project needs your votes today, as it is the last day of that contest.

Victory Gardening as a positive force can’t be underestimated.  Our resident Victory Gardener and historian Rose Hayden-Smith wrote a few months back about the power of a national gardening effort during wartime, which “helped the family budget; improved dietary practices; reduced the food mile and saved fuel; enabled America to export more food to our allies; beautified communities; enabled every American to contribute to a national effort; and helped bridge social, ethnic, class and cultural differences during a time when cooperation was widely needed.”  All this with just a little show of Presidential leadership.

Walking in your farmer’s shoes also allows you to appreciate the effort that goes into producing your food, and makes you scratch your head when you hear about the abysmal government policies propagating poor nutrition and by extension unhealthy communities.

And did I mention, gardening is fun?  Eating something you’ve grown gives you a sense of well-being that going to the grocery store never will.

“President-elect Obama ran on a platform of social change and of reaching across the political aisle and national borders to tackle big problems together.” Doiron says. “Organic gardens do just that. They’re not conservative or liberal, white or black, male or female, gay or straight. They cut across all lines and offer a hands-on, low-cost way of making progress on global warming, food security, health care and energy independence.”

It remains to be seen whether or not Obama will go the way of the Roosevelts. He has been a little tone deaf on ag policy so far (over-focused on ethanol, taking back his praise of Pollan’s letter to him in the Times, Vilsack appointment), but he did say way back when that he was interested in greening the White House. This could be one of the most economical and far-reaching ways to begin to fill that promise.

This Saturday, November 22 at noon, San Francisco Bay Area residents will gather for an Eat-In at the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in front of San Francisco City Hall. An Eat-In is a group of people gathering in a public space in order to share a meal. This Eat-In serves to bring local residents together to discuss how we ensure that everyone has access to good, clean and fair food. It is free of cost and open to the first 200 who register at http://slowfoodnation.org/get-involved/community-days-in-the-victory-garden/

Organizers are providing tables and chairs. The meal is a potluck. Participants bring their own plates, cups and silverware and home-cooked food to share. Before the meal, activists and advocates from Quesada Gardens, La Cocina, Glide Memorial Church, Nextcourse, the San Francisco Food Bank, the California Food and Justice Coalition, the St. Anthony Foundation and Project Homeless Connect will highlight programs that are improving our local food system. This event marks the last day the Victory Garden is open before volunteers begin a two-week project to dismantle it. Materials from the garden are being donated to Project Homeless Connect to help them build an edible urban garden.  The final harvest will be donated to the San Francisco Food Bank.

If you’re in the Bay Area and would like to attend the Eat-In, please reserve a seat.

The election is over, and it’s time to think about the future. Glass ceilings have been shattered, and all sorts of barriers we thought existed have disappeared. I’ve got gardening on my mind…it seems even more important now.

The Victory Gardens of World War I and World War II – and the garden efforts of the Great Depression – helped Americans successfully negotiate hard times. These gardens helped the family budget; improved dietary practices; reduced the food mile and saved fuel; enabled America to export more food to our allies; beautified communities; enabled every American to contribute to a national effort; and helped bridge social, ethnic, class and cultural differences during a time when cooperation was widely needed. Gardens were an expression of solidarity, of patriotism, and shared sacrifice. They were found everywhere…schools, homes, and throughout public spaces in communities all over the nation. No gardening effort was too small. Every effort counted. Americans did their bit. And it mattered.

Consider this: In WWI, the Federal Bureau of Education nationalized a school garden program and funded it with War Department monies. Millions of students gardened at school, at home, and in their communities. A national Liberty Garden (later Victory Garden) program was initiated that called upon all Americans to garden for the nation, and the world. In part because of the success of home gardeners (and careful food preservation), the U.S. was able to increase exports to our starving European Allies. During 1943, an estimated 3/5ths of Americans participated in some sort of gardening activity, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who planted a Victory Garden on the White House Lawn, and Vice President Henry Wallace, who gardened with his son at the VP’s residence. Nearly 40% of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed stateside during 1943 were grown in school, home and community gardens. In addition to providing much-needed food, gardening helped Americans accept the nation’s plurality, providing a positive experience that transcended race, class and socioeconomic divisions. That bridged rural/urban differences. They provided a way for all Americans to provide a service to the nation. Gardens were not a diversion…through gardening efforts, Americans made significant contributions to the war effort.

Our nation has many needs right now. Families need help with their personal economies. Entire communities are food-insecure. We have a tenuous connection with the land, and a poor understanding of our food system. Obesity is an epidemic. Environmental concerns – and declining oil supplies – dictate a need to recreate more sustainable and local food systems. And Americans have proven that they are hungry for change, eager to re-engage with their neighbors, their communities, their nation.

A revival of the successful national gardening programs of the past could help in many, many ways. This would not be a costly program. All of the educational materials that support school, home and community gardens is available through existing government agencies and private organizations. A government-sponsored program through the USDA, state land grant institutions, and county government fields thousands of highly-trained Master Gardeners who could be called upon to share their expertise with school, home and community gardeners.

What is needed to make this idea a reality is an “ask” by our new President. Simply encourage all Americans that can to plant some sort of garden for the spring/summer season of 2009. Encourage them to plant for their families, and their communities. To share extra produce with food banks and the growing number of hungry in our nation. Put a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. (You might consider talking to my friend Roger Doiron about that -visit him at Eat The View).

And please visit my UC Victory Website for additional information about how the past could inform current public policy in this area.

Video: Original WWII film on victory gardening

In fifteen days, Americans will make an important decision: who will take the reigns and get us out of this mess.  One topic the candidates have mostly left out of their speeches on the campaign trail thus far is food.  Whether they realize it or not, when either John McCain or Barack Obama sit down next January to begin the task of fixing our economy, to promote green energy in order to produce the jobs they’ve both promised, and to deal with the climate crisis and health care, food will be the unavoidable issue that keeps cropping up.

Perhaps the candidates don’t yet realize food’s role in these issues, or maybe they assume that because less than 1% of the population is currently working as a farmer, the topic does not appeal to the voting constituency that matters most.  But I think we are ready for a president that is willing to create a more nuanced food policy as opposed to leaving it unchanged in thirty years.  Telling farms to “get big or get out” as a philosophy for food security has long ago reached the point of diminishing returns.  So what will the next president do about it?

McCain’s agriculture policy can be found under the heading Prosperity for Rural America.  There is little here to show that a McCain administration would stray very far from current agriculture policy that favors agribusiness.  Recognizing agriculture’s role in national security is a good start.  But in McCain’s plan, there isn’t even a peep about organic or local agriculture.  He supports unchecked free trade, meaning that our lower priced subsidized food will compete with other nations that might not have such subsidy programs, disenfranchising small farmers in developing nations.  Should McCain follow through with his threat to end subsidies, however, there is no evidence here that he would offer any alternatives to struggling farmers.

He also views technology and growth as the sole measure of our agricultural potential.  Scary is McCain’s plan for upping production: to “direct the USDA to carry out comprehensive research to help develop more stress-resistant, higher yielding crops to increase production per acre,” giving a further carte blanche to corporations like Monsanto, which have dominated the genetically modified foods and pesticide sectors for decades.  McCain sees bio-technology as the key to “reducing reliance on petroleum-based inputs, and improving the long-term sustainability of agricultural production.”  But the track record is clear, genetically modified foods do carry unforseen consequences, require much oil in the form of pesticides and the energy moving the machines spraying them, encourage practices that strip the land of productivity over time and encourage less diverse crops and by extension, less diverse diets.

While McCain supports funding nutrition assistance programs, including indexing food stamps to reflect the current cost of living, he also seeks to cede the marketing of healthy diets to the fruit and vegetable companies, which have special interests at heart when doling out such information.

By comparison, Obama’s plan, Real Leadership for Rural America, reflects actual change from the current corporate-friendly policies.  Though for the most part lacking in concreteness, his plan goes further by recognizing the problems that previous administrations have been unwilling or unable to discuss.

Obama supports capping commodity subsidies at $250,000, and looks to close loopholes that allow farmers to subdivide their operations into multiple paper corporations.  His plan talks about regulating Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), which raise 40% of our livestock and are one of the largest polluters in America, with tougher air and water pollution standards.  Extending from that, the plan states that there will be limits placed on Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) funding to CAFOs, so that instead of taxpayers, the largest polluters must pay for their own environmental clean-up.

He promises to strengthen anti-monopoly laws, which thrills me, though I worry that riding on the Archer Daniels Midland corporate jet during the campaign has fueled Obama’s interest in ethanol, that company’s largest emerging industry, even though it has a poor net return on energy invested ratio (currently 1 unit of energy invested nets 1.3 energy output) and is destroying car engines.  Here I agree with McCain: corn-based ethanol production should no longer be subsidized by the U.S. government.

Both agriculture plans tie in energy, but Obama’s plan goes further to seek to improve the quality of life in rural America.  Community is an essential element to building local economies.  The Obama plan includes providing locally grown, healthy foods to school meal programs.  It also promotes encouraging young people to become farmers through training programs and capital gains tax breaks for those selling their land to beginning family farmers.  Obama’s plan also gives importance to encouraging organic and sustainable agriculture through increased funding to help farmers become certified.  But most impressive: “Barack Obama and Joe Biden recognize that local and regional food systems are better for our environment and support family-scale producers.  They will emphasize the need for Americans to Buy Fresh and Buy Local, and will implement USDA policies that promote local and regional food systems.”

Does this mean that the Victory Garden on the White House lawn that Alice Waters has been promoting and that Micheal Pollan suggested in last week’s New York Times Magazine might be within reach?  We will have to wait and see what happens on November 4th.

Photo: rhondawinter Victory Garden, City Hall in San Francisco

This Saturday, October 18, from 11am to 3pm, Slow Food Nation is hosting activities and workshops for kids and adults on how to grow food in San Francisco. The morning features hands-on educational garden activities for kids, including a puppet show on nutrition; the afternoon features short workshops on urban farming and a performance by the Brass Liberation Orchestra. Parents, bring your kids!

11am to 1pm: Local garden teachers and puppeteers lead activities for children to enjoy and learn about the garden. Suitable for all ages, including parents.

1pm to 2pm: Urban farmers and local gardeners present on topics such as “Guerilla Gardening” and “Perennials and Herbs in San Francisco.”

2pm: Performance by the Brass Liberation Orchestra!

If you have questions or want to host a workshop activity, please write to gordon[at]slowfoodnation[dot]org.

Participating organizations:
Alemany Farm
Urban Sprouts
Edible Schoolyard
Puppet Medicine
Urban Permaculture Guild
and the Brass Liberation Orchestra

The next Community Days are November 1 and November 22. Check slowfoodnation.org for updates!

Photo by Scott Chernis

As the sun sets on the fourth and final day of Slow Food Nation, we’re thrilled to announce that the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden will remain in place on the lawn of San Francisco City Hall until November. The garden, which has been producing substantial amounts of fresh produce and supplied some of the food for this weekend’s events, has received tremendous support from Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city. Most everyone who has come down to witness the beauty and bounty of the garden has voiced their desires to see this project become a permanent symbol of San Francisco’s progressive position on food, farming, and social justice.

“By all accounts, this has been a wonderful installation for the city and has been a highly visible demonstration of our commitment to the issues embodied in how our food system operates,” said Mayor Newsom. “From protecting the environment, to supporting our local and regional economy, to ensuring we can provide access to wholesome, nutritious food for all San Franciscans, the Victory Garden has given us a powerful platform from which to make the case for more good, clean and fair food in this country.”

If you haven’t visited the garden yet, please do! The corn is high, the squash are mature, and the California native wildflowers are in full bloom.

Images: jrodmanjr and Sarah Rich

This coming Saturday, August 16, in the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden, the city of San Francisco is organizing a Community Day for residents of the Bay Area to come together around food, gardening, and the power of local communities working together to improve the city.

Daniel Homsey, program manager for the Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN), has his finger on the pulse of neighborhood organizations and community events around the city. “We are hoping community members from the all corners of the City, from the Outer Richmond avenues to the Bayview, will come out and participate in this exciting day full of puppet shows, carnival games, and tours of the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden,” says Homsey.

Residents will have the opportunity to tour the gardens and hear the garden managers explain why they chose certain vegetables for the SF Victory Garden and how the growth of the gardens is progressing. The Sustainability Road Show will be there with their Sustainability Resource Fair, complete with puppets and a carnival show. The fun-filled day will offer San Franciscans a chance to learn more about the city’s edible demonstration garden and to take part in this project that promotes healthy local food and shows the community some different ways to live a more environmentally sustainable life.

The Community Day is being put on in partnership with the SF Victory Garden Project, Slow Food Nation, the Sustainable Living Roadshow, and the Neighborhood Empowerment Network; along with the city of San Francisco and its partners, Garden for the Environment, Department for the Environment, Department of Health, Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, Norcal, San Francisco Department of Recreation and Park, and the Public Utilities Commission.

Photo by Daniel Homsey

Amy Franceschini is the founder of Victory Gardens 2008+ as well as the web-based collectives Futurefarmers and Free-Soil, where she contributes her talents as a multi-media artist to conceptual projects designed to raise awareness on sustainable living and inspire inquiry and innovation. Amy seeks to engage people of diverse disciplines in a spirited dialogue about lessening our impact on the earth through encouraging us to focus on nurturing our creative energies and thus allowing for the cross-pollination of ideas. She is also currently a professor of art at Stanford University and the San Francisco Institute of Art. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at the SFMOMA, the MOMA and Whitney museums of New York, as well as internationally in the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Emily Callahan: Was the idea for Victory Gardens 2008 inspired by the historical Victory Gardens that American communities planted in response to food shortages during WWII or did the idea for more sustainable gardens come first and the name seem to be a great parallel in terms of communities taking charge of their destiny?

Amy Franceschini: The idea was a culmination of many concerns, but upon learning of the historical vg program a continuum of ideas were galvanized into VG 2008+–

I first became aware of the WWII Victory Garden program in Laura Lawson’s City Bountiful: A History of Community Gardening in America. This effort was initiated in 1941 by the Office of Civilian Defense in cooperation with the Department of Agriculture. Through a National Garden conference a Guide for Planning the Local Victory Garden Program was produced and distributed to cities across the country. Between 1941 and 1943 there were 20 million Victory Gardens and 41% of our total food was being produced in Victory Gardens.

This image of 20 million gardens being planted within two years gave me the fuel to imagine a new program with a focus on contemporary food issues. My intentions were set to revive not only a city-supported gardening program, but a personal revival to get politicized and radicalized about the current food crisis. I am an idealist and I believe that the government is the PEOPLE and was designed to reflect, represent and support the needs of the PEOPLE. This country has lost touch with what that means and in my mind participation is a big part of making this big list of ingredients and cooks into an amazing potluck. More and more, businesses and corporations control “public policy” and have the power and autonomy to develop sustainable systems/products. The homogenizing effect has resulted in loss of the decentralized decision-making made at a local level. Despite the conservative tendencies on a national level, San Francisco city has been successful in moving the progressive movement forward on many fronts. It inspired me to think about the city as a place where progressive ideas can take root.

EC: The kick-off to the Slow Food Nation event here in San Francisco is the planting of an edible ornamental Victory Garden at City Hall whose produce will be donated to local food banks at the end of the summer. What is your artistic vision for this? What do you hope people internalize when they see the garden?

AF: There are two crucial points that should be inherent in the project:

1. City hall/Civic Center should be a place where city politics are visualized, demonstrated, and played out. If the city is supporting urban agriculture, of course there should be a garden in front of city hall demonstrating what they support. Civic center should be an external portrait of what is going on inside and throughout the city.

2. The garden should also highlight the efforts of current garden/urban agriculture practitioners in the community. There is a long-standing movement in the bay area that needs to be honored. The garden should serve as an invitation to meet and witness the practices of these garden organizations. Further it should be a stepping-stone to the home sites of these organizations. The civic center garden should be a place to educate, inspire and trigger participation beyond this central location.

EC: In addition to the Victory Garden planted at City Hall, your organization plans to work with San Francisco residents to plant 15 unique gardens that represent what’s possible for urban dwellers in this microclimate. What makes this challenging besides space constraints?

AF: The biggest challenge is continued participation. This will require education and a systemic approach.

EC: You’ve planted three victory gardens already with the help of the Garden for the Environment. Where are they and can they be viewed by the public?

AF: All three gardens were planted in private residences. The first garden was in the inner Richmond district, the second in the Sunset and the third in Bayview Hunters Point. The gardens can be viewed by appointment only. The Sunset House can be visited by appointment and the Bayview project is a public space.

EC: Do you have any formal education in horticulture? Do you have your own garden?

AF: I have no “formal” training, although my parents were both farmers. My father farmed over 4000 acres in the San Joaquin valley and my mother had a small, organic farm in San Luis Obispo. I was very involved in food politics through their practice whether it was fighting over water rights or canvassing to neighbors to demand farmer to stop using Malathyon within city limits of Oceano, California. I only have an herb garden, figs and a lemon trees. I have a very small space for growing and have the good Fortune of having Rainbow Grocery three blocks away.

EC: What do you envision for the future of Victory Gardens in San Francisco? Will there be any effort to reclaim land in Golden Gate Park where 800 victory gardens were planted back in the 1940s?

AF: The future of Victory Gardens will be a confident and educated public of food producers! I envision a city program that will support cultivation of public lands; schools, parks, surplus lands. This will entail a larger educational/training component. Our dream is to Reclaim the land across the street from the Garden for the Environment (GFE). To use this to expand the already successful, booming programming and training at the GFE.

EC: When you look back at the history of the Victory Gardens during WWII times, do you think the same kind of support will be engendered by your effort? In your opinion, what does “victory” mean during these times?

AF: I purposefully kept this name to bring up the historical context as it relates to a not so different ethos of today. That said, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to explore the notion of reclamation and redefining of an idea / program. Conceptually, it provokes an idea that we cannot keep thinking in terms of “new” ideas. We need to look to past models and build upon them – adopt relevant concerns; conservation, education, land use, urban agriculture and nutrition etc. and apply them to our current political reality.

What do we want to be cultivating as urban farmers today? As you are well aware, “Victory,” for the WWI and WWII Victory Garden programs was “winning the war.” Winning the war by growing more food at home so that the nation could send more food overseas to support the war effort.

“Victory” for the Victory Garden 2008 program is independence from a food system whose values we do not support. “Victory” for the Victory Garden program is reducing the food miles associated with the average American meal by growing more food locally. “Victory” is building an alternative to the American industrial food system, which we view as injurious to ourselves, and to the planet. In this way we redefine Victory within the pressing context of urban sustainability, while building upon the previously successful Victory Garden model.

I had my reservations about keeping the name Victory Gardens, but it is something that people across a wide spectrum understand. If we are going to truly cultivate a large-scale food revolution it must be popular. The name gives us a chance to discuss gardening in a time of war. The problematics inherent in the title opens up space for conversation, like this one! If it were called “Happy Gardens” like one city official proposed, maybe we would be denying ourselves from looking at some of the darker realities associated with food policy.

Photo courtesy of Victory Gardens 2007+