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Making Kitchen Gardens into Frontpage News

Making Kitchen Gardens into Frontpage News

2011

 

KGI recognized as one of the "best gardening periodicals, forums and blogs," the only registered nonprofit to make the short list. 
 

2010

 

The editors of 2board’s have included KGI founder, Roger Doiron, on their green shortlist of inspirational crusaders for a better world. The others chosen were: Jean-Michel Cousteau, Chairman and President of the Ocean Futures Society; Cristina Mittermeier, founder of International League of Conservation Photographers; Blake Mycoskie, Founder & Chief Shoe Giver of TOMS shoes who has donated more than a million shoes to children in need around the world; David de Rothschild who sailed a 60-foot catamaran made from 12,500 plastic bottles from San Fransisco to Sydney, in an effort to inspire individuals, communities and businesses to reduce, reuse and recycle more of the natural resources; Gisele Bündchen, supermodel and UN Goodwill Ambassador dedicated to protecting the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and Amazon Rainforest; Ted Danson, actor and founder Americas Oceans Campaign; Trip van Noppen, President of Earthjustice; Angelina Jolie, Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commission for Refugees, Jolie-Pitt Foundation.
 
One of the newsroom editors asked me the other day what impact the Michelle Obama vegetable garden has had on the organic garden movement. Not to be disrespectful to my editor or the first lady, but I said the question should be, what impact has the organic garden movement had on the first lady? ...Kitchen Gardeners International might be a primary reason why Michelle Obama picked up a shovel in the first place. In 2008, they launched an "Eat the View" campaign that challenged the White House to put a vegetable garden "back" on the property....Michelle Obama broke ground in March 2009 a year after "Eat the View" was in full swing and picking up speed in the New York Times, Washington Post and other major news organizations.
 
Cygnet has some very special gardens. A tour of four of them on World Kitchen Garden Day demonstrated how different home food gardens can be.
 
Phil Decker, the principal of Four Corners Elementary in far east Salem was counting his blessings today for his school being located next door to Trinity United Methodist Church. They do a lot for our school,” Decker said. “Most of the church’s members are up in age, so they’re more like grandparents to our students. They are wonderful people” Decker made the comments at a community barbecue at Trinity United Methodist Church earlier today. In addition to food and fellowship, attendees also took a tour of Julie’s Garden, a 10,000 square-foot learning garden located behind the church. The garden is a partnership between Trinity United Methodist Church, Four Corners Elementary School and Marion-Polk Food Share. The event was part of “World Kitchen Garden Day,” a day when families, friends, neighbors and members of the community gather to celebrate the pleasures and benefits of home-grown, hand-made foods. The community barbecue fed more than 250 people, with a number of those being homeless individuals and families.Many of the vegetables served alongside the food came directly from Julie’s Garden.
 
Roger Doiron, on the other hand, has calculated the savings of a home garden. The founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, a Scarborough, Me.-based nonprofit network of gardeners committed to "relocalizing the food supply" (and the group that led the push for an edible garden in the White House), Doiron has been gardening seriously for about eight years.

In 2008, he and his wife kept meticulous records of the food that came out of their 1,600-square-foot garden in Maine, and then compared it with how much that same produce would have cost: at a conventional grocery store; at the farmer's market; and at Whole Foods. Subtracting their costs, Doiron found that his family of five saved about $2,000 during the year by growing their own produce. (You can see a detailed breakdown of his data here).

Doiron, who has argued for a tax breakfor home growers, envisions domestic gardens playing a large-scale economic role in a future marked by big-picture issues like climate change and peak oil. "When you have some 90 million households in the U.S. with a yard of some sort, Doiron says, the potential for monetary savings and food-output from kitchen gardens "can really add up."

He anticipates another economic benefit to home-growing: "To the extent that we do become a nation of gardeners, we will really be reviving a whole sector of our economy as (garden-related) businesses crop up as a result."

 
Last year, Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, a nonprofit based in Scarborough, Maine, carefully cataloged what his 1,600-square-foot vegetable garden produced, and then calculated what he would have spent on the same produce at a local farmers' market, an upscale food store (Whole Foods), and a local supermarket. All told, he and his family of five saved as much as $2,200 by growing their own fruits and vegetables, including lettuce, potatoes, and peas.
 
Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International, whose Food Independence Day campaign I blogged about last year, is at it again, this time on Facebook (you do not have to be a member to view the campaign, put your local food picnic on the map or sign the Declaration of Food Independence). Roger has expressed his homegrown patriotism publicly over the last few years, first with his Eat the View campaign, which gathered over 100,000 signatures toward a kitchen garden on the White House Lawn, and later landed him an invite to that garden.
 
Wondering why your tomatoes are losing their leaves or how to plant garlic cloves to grow your own? Raise your gardening IQ with answers to these and other home horticulture questions via forums and blogs at this meeting place for Kitchen Gardeners International—the folks who helped sow the seeds for the White House kitchen garden. Be sure to visit the site in anticipation of Kitchen Garden Day, August 22. 
 
"Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet " by Bill McKibben (Times Books, April 2010)
...decentralization will be crucial, because all of a sudden we need vast amounts of information, very little of which can actually come from New York or Los Angeles. For instance, far more people are going to need to grow food. We're used to thinking of farmers as not quite bright, but in fact each one makes more decisions in a day than a whole platoon of investment bankers -- and if they get them wrong, not much grows. That's why it's troubling that the chain of transmission for knowledge about how to farm is almost broken. In 2002, the average age of an American farmer was fifty-four, and steadily rising.  Farmers' children have taken up other occupations. The big land-grant colleges have ag schools, but most of these might as well be subsidiaries of Cargill and Monsanto; they teach corporate-scale farming. So: it's a very good thing that when you google "how to compost video" you get about 1.7 million responses. There are thousands of films, many of them excellent. (Many of them dull, also, but earnest.) Myself, I like the one from KitchenGardeners.org, with its companion presentation, "Our Buddy Bacteria."  In the comments section, someone has written "Very good delivery of information. I shall act on it," which is precisely the response any of us communicators would yearn for. 
 
The Obama family is celebrating the first anniversary of their new kitchen garden, but in my house we're putting two candles on the organic carrot cake and making a wish for our national food gardening future.
 
As political rivals vied for their respective party’s embrace in 2008, a national coalition of gardeners called “Eat the View” was gathering supporters to demand that whomever the next president was, they would replant the White House lawn with edibles. Others piled on. A call went out for the longed-for garden to be certified organic. Celebrated foodie Michael Pollan urged the imagined produce be sent to D.C. food banks.
 
Roger Doiron is the founding director of the nonprofit Kitchen Gardeners International and was active in the White House kitchen garden campaign. Fast Company magazine called Roger one of the ten most inspiring people in sustainable food for his campaign for a White House kitchen garden. DigitalJournal.com spoke to Doiron about the role of kitchen gardeners and why people should grow their own food. 
 
KGI's video "Havana Homegrown: Inside Cuba's Urban Agriculture Revolution" featured.
 
The Daily Green's senior editor Dan Shapley asked Roger Doiron, a 2009 Heart of Green Award winner, and founder of Kitchen Gardeners International (newly redesigned - check it out!) 13 questions about gardening for beginners (3 of which are featured here) and gardening for politicians (stay tuned).
 
KGI Founder, Roger Doiron, named one of the "10 Most Inspiring People in Sustainable Food" in the good company of Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver and Robert Kenner.
 
In 2008, Kitchen Gardeners International gathered more than 100,000 signatures to convince the future president to replace part of the White House lawn with an 1,100-square-foot organic kitchen garden. Now, politicians from Ohio to Maryland to California are eager to show off their own kitchen gardens outside state capitals and city halls.
 
Kitchen Gardeners organized Eat the View, the successful campaign that brought gardening to the lawn of the White House. Now that they've made our first family a little healthier, the organization will continue advocating for healthier, more localized foods.
 

2009

 
Associated Press
 On the day Americans celebrate the land of the free, a Maine man wants governors to feel free to live off the land. A sustainable food advocate who campaigned for the Obamas to plant a garden at the White House has now received pledges from several governor’s offices to feature local foods on their Fourth of July menus, from Maine lobster to South Dakota pheasant jerky to milkshakes made with Montana huckleberries. Roger Doiron said he was inspired to lobby governors to promote locally grown food after a patch of White House lawn was turned into an organic vegetable garden this spring. Doiron is founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, a nonprofit that promotes food self-reliance through kitchen gardens and sustainable local food systems. Local foods are good for the palate, the health, local economies, the environment and your wallet, he said.
 
Boston Globe
The image of Michelle Obama surrounded by fifth-graders digging into the White House dirt gave heart to locavores everywhere. The idea of an edible landscape was fertilized by left coast chef Alice Waters and food guru Michael Pollan. But it was Roger Doiron, a modest Zone 6 gardener - my kind of guy - and head of Kitchen Gardeners International who began a lettuce-roots campaign last year to "Eat the View" at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
 
The pace of change speaks to the power of the first family to shift people’s views and the public’s sense of urgency about environmental issues. I don’t think previous presidents were able to connect the dots between food, health, economics, and sustainability as we can now. The important and wonderful news about the new White House garden is that those connections are being made in a visible and lasting way on our country’s most emblematic patch of ground.
 

US First Lady Michelle Obama is set to break the ground for an organic garden on a patch of the south lawn to grow produce for the White House kitchen. The initiative will be welcomed by advocates of the eat local movement such as Kitchen Gardeners International, a coalition of gardeners whose mission is to inspire and teach people to grow their own food.  More than 100,000 people signed the group's online petition urging the Obamas to replant an edible garden at the White House. In 1800 John Adams, the first president to live in the White House, planted a garden.


Los Angeles Times
More than 100,000 people have lobbied the president online to plant a garden on the White House lawn, according to Kitchen Gardeners International, a coalition of gardeners whose mission is to inspire and teach people to grow their own food. The group's Eat the View campaign to plant "high-impact gardens in high-profile places" urged the first family to start an edible garden within the first 100 days of the Obama administration. Launched in February 2008 and spearheaded by Roger Doiron, a gardener in Scarborough, Maine, the movement hoped to have the president's family set the right example in terms of healthful eating -- "gardening for the greater good," as Doiron said.  "It begins at home," Doiron said. "That's where we start. And if we get a number of people together carrying out these small actions, it will speak volumes and add up."

President Barack Obama would be wise to add a gardener or farmer to his team of advisers. I already know what advice I'd offer if called to serve: Launch a new victory garden campaign starting with one on the White House lawn.
 
Roger Doiron, founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a nonprofit group, is one of several people who want the Obamas to plant an edible garden that would serve as a national model.
 
Agence France Presse
Nearly 85,000 people have signed an online petition calling for part of the White House lawn to be turned into a vegetable patch, the plan's germinator said Wednesday."The idea is for the Obama family to plant an organic vegetable garden on part of the White House lawn, with the cultivated veggies going to the White House kitchen and any overflow going to feed those in need," Roger Doiron, told AFP, adding the idea had sprouted last year. If the Obamas were to plant a garden on the White House grounds, it would have the "inspirational potential" to spawn millions of similar gardens, not only in the United States but around the world, Doiron predicted.

 

Hard to believe, but even in the crackle of winter, the victory garden is gaining steam. Our hero from this summer, Roger Doiron, who made that nifty video about turning the White House lawn into an organic garden, has just won first place for that idea in a contest sponsored by On Day One, an online suggestion box for the new Obama administration.  This is no small potatoes: On Day One is a project of The Better World Campaign, whose mission is to build a stronger relationship between the United States and the United Nations. Mr. Doiron’s idea was chosen from thousands of entries spread across nine issue categories.
The nonprofit group Kitchen Gardeners International wants to inspire people to grow their own food in home gardens. More recently, its “Eat the View!” campaign has targeted the ultimate home garden — the White House lawn. To boost its efforts, the group has launched a new video: “The Garden of Eatin’: A Short History of America’s Garden.” The video details the fascinating and sometimes tumultuous history of White House food gardening.
 
Washington Post
"If we were to have a first family to take this on and lead by example, we would see a ripple effect across the country and across the world," said Roger Doiron, an organic gardener and food activist in Scarborough, Maine, who last year started a campaign to pressure the next president to grow veggies at the White House. He calls his petition drive Eat the View.
 

2008

 
Wall Street Journal
Roger Doiron envisions a presidential vegetable garden. The founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International, an advocacy group in Scarborough, Maine, that is part of the eating-local movement, runs a campaign called Eat the View to promote a White House garden. Mr. Doiron has gathered more than 10,000 signatures on a petition supporting the idea. His cause ranks first in votes among more than 5,000 ideas for President Obama that people have submitted to On Day One, a project of a group called Better World Fund that promotes good ties between the U.S. and the United Nations.

Winners have been chosen in an online video contest aimed at inspiring the next president, Congress and the public to take meaningful action on human-caused climate change. The goal, in essence, was to solicit fresh messages on global warming that might punch through the “something, someday, somewhere” aura that sociologists say makes this a particularly tough issue to build a movement around. The contest was organized by the climate coalition called 1Sky.org and Brighter Planet, a company offering ways to invest in nonpolluting energy projects through “carbon offsets.”
As more and more folks turn their manicured front lawns into vegetable gardens, a grassroots groundswell is urging our next President—whoever that may be—to pick up a hoe and join in the fun. A guy named Roger Doiron has just posted a clever little video that might become his organization’s battle cry (and I won’t spoil the fun by revealing the title).
 
International Herald Tribune
 It has been decades since that famous forager Euell Gibbons reached through the White House fence and picked four edible weeds out of the president's garden. This is not something that the Secret Service would recommend you try today. But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He's started a campaign to get a kitchen garden growing on the White House lawn. Doiron works out of his small Cape house in Maine, where I find him one summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he's part of the fastest-growing (I used the words literally) movement in the country. His organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose chain of partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but locavores. They want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in their front and backyard.
 
New York Times
Mr. Doiron’s latest cause is challenging the presidential candidates to plant a garden on the White House lawn. He has posted his proposal, “Eat the View,” on www.OnDayOne.org, a Web site where people record their visions for the next president. “This would not be a quaint little garden for the White House chef,” he said. “I have something fairly ambitious in mind, that would make a powerful political statement — a garden large enough to cover most of what the White House needs, with an overflow to a local food pantry."

 

2007

 

Re ''If It's Fresh and Local, Is It Always Greener?'' (The Feed, Dec. 9), about the carbon footprint of food transportation: If ''local'' is the ''new organic'' when it comes to food, then what is the ''new local''? I would like to suggest that the next generation of local eaters will not only have green values, but also green thumbs. The article pointed out the complexity of determining food's true carbon footprint. No post-graduate degree is needed to calculate the ''food miles'' of home-grown produce; a tape measure works just fine.

 

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