[OKC] Let's all write the mayor!

[Robert Waldrop]

Here's a nice weekend project.

Let's all write Mayor Cornett ( mayor at okc.gov ) , and encourage him to get on the Victory Garden bandwagon.  Below is an editorial from today's Dallas Morning News about the rise of interest in home gardening.

Some talking points include:

+ This wouldn't involve anything he would find politically iffy, like signing the Mayors' Global Warming pledge.  It doesn't involve spending millions of scarce city dollars.

+ This would intersect nicely with the Mayor's weight-loss program.  Gardening involves physical exercise, and the veggies grown in home plots taste much better than store-bought.  Better tasting veggies = more veggies eaten = less deep fried chicken fried steak.

+ Gardening promotes local self reliance, thrift, and frugality, which are all good community virtues.

+ Gardening is a traditional Oklahoma activity.

+ Extra produce can be donated to the regional food bank.

+ There are lots of community organizations to help -- Urban Harvest at the Regional Food Bank, OKC Organic Gardening Association, Master Gardener Program at the County Extention Office.

Let's plant 10,000 new gardens this year!

Bob Waldrop, OKC

Editorial: Victory Gardens '08

06:28 AM CDT on Friday, April 25, 2008


City folks in Dallas and its suburbs who have been planting tomatoes and suchlike in their back yards for years might not realize it, but they're part of an encouraging new national trend. 

"Agriculture is becoming more and more suburban," Roxanne Christensen tells The Wall Street Journal. She should know: Her company, Spin-Farming (www.spinfarming.com) teaches people how to do intensive small-scale - as in, backyard - farming for profit. The Dervaes family of Pasadena, Calif., are wizards at this sort of thing, growing 6,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables annually on a mere one-fifth of an acre of urban land. 

Most backyard vegetable gardeners don't do it to make money, but for the sheer pleasure. We wouldn't be surprised, though, if the skyrocketing price of food inspires more urbanites and suburbanites to set aside small patches of their lawns to cultivate vegetables for personal use. 

It's happened before. During the Second World War, food and fuel rationing, as well as labor shortages, sparked a government effort to encourage ordinary citizens to help feed themselves. Thus was born the "Victory Garden," an estimated 20 million of which sprouted in back yards and empty city lots all over America. By 1945, these personal and neighborhood gardens provided as astonishing 40 percent of U.S. fruit and vegetable consumption. 

There's a grassroots movement under way to revive the Victory Garden, and not just to lower household grocery bills. Green activists encourage backyard green thumbs because they cut down on greenhouse gases emitted from delivery trucks. 

Influential food writer Michael Pollan takes this line, but he also says learning how to grow some of your own food is good for the soul. Home fruit and vegetable gardening builds self-reliance and confidence, and it teaches you practical knowledge that far more Americans possessed several generations ago, before the modern economy made agriculture a specialized industry. 

Given what may be the end of the cheap-energy era, which would in turn end cheap food prices, Mr. Pollan speculates that "these are skills and habits of mind we're all very soon going to need." Sounds dire? Sure. But who would have predicted we'd see rice rationing in suburban Costcos? Start one of your own 


Here are 10 tips for starting a backyard garden in the spirit of the World War II era. The advice was assembled by Blair Randall, the director of a San Francisco project to revive victory gardens. 


1. Get to know your soil. 


2. Know your climate. 

3. Add compost. 


4. Give up part of your lawn. 


5. Plant a fruit tree. 


6. Share with your neighbors. 


7. Plan in the winter for your spring plantings. 


8. Eat locally. 


9. Get out into your yard by tending a garden. 


10. Donate extra produce to your local food bank
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sustainableokc.org/pipermail/okc-sustainableokc.org/attachments/20080425/e8051825/attachment.htm>