KGI News: April 2008

Contents:

Gardening:

-Growing peas

-The cutest baby of the bunch

-Planting the urban jungle

Book of the month

-Interview with organic farmer and writer Will Allen

KGI News:

-KGI: a "globolocal" phenomenon

-KGI featured on DownEast.com

From KGI's new social network:

Popular discussions:

-what will you be doing differently for this year's garden?

-container gardens: tips and tricks?

-pruning vegetables???

Featured network members:

-Zooms, Grenada, West Indies

-Kyle Glassman, Iowa, USA

-Issiaka Sanou, Montreal, Canada

Popular videos:

-Making compost

-Planting garlic

-Beauty food

-History of gastronomy

Help us make the local foods movement localer!

As mentioned in our last newsletter, we've got a matching grant opportunity from an anonymous donor who wants to help us develop a small grants fund.  Here's a chance to make your contribution to KGI really count by having it matched dollar for dollar and having it go directly to gardeners and gardening projects in need via our new grants program. 

-Join/renew by online payment

-Join/renew by mail-in check

Check out our new online community:

http://my.kitchengardeners.org

KGI's Book of the Month:

Do you have a website or a blog?  You can grab the code for the sidebar widgets above on our website. 

Dear Kitchen Gardener,

From times immemorial, gardeners throughout the world have endured hardships of all kinds: floods, droughts, blights, swarming locusts, and, in the case of Dutch growers, centuries of uncomfortable footwear.

As a New England gardener, I have my own share of climate-related challenges, for example trying to keep track of seasons that can change from one hour to the next. For those of you who haven’t been to Maine before, we just recently welcomed the arrival of our fifth season – mud season – which is sandwiched between winter and spring and which helps explain why babies here are born wearing miniature LL Bean boots instead of pink and blue booties. Spring here only starts around May 1st and usually wraps up around May 10th or 15th. For those of you who are curious, Maine’s summer officially starts with the arrival of the first mosquito or Massachusetts tourist, whichever comes first, and ends when all of them, tourists and stinging insects, have left.

In celebration of mud season, I am proposing that home growers finally catch a break. Not from bugs, weather, or clunky garden shoes, but from taxes. It’s not as silly an idea as it may sound. We provide fiscal incentives to people to encourage them to put hybrid cars in their garages and solar panels on their roofs, so why not offer incentives for solar-powered, healthy food production in their backyard? With wars still waging, food and oil costs rising, and paychecks stretching to the breaking point, now is the time for a home-grown revival. What better way to usher in this revolution than by marrying two great American traditions: vegetable gardening and tax cuts?

It wouldn’t be the first time that our country encouraged its citizens to grow some of their own food. The government’s wartime “Victory Garden” campaign was a success by every measure. By 1943, 20 million gardens were growing 8 million tons of food (an amount comparable to that of the nation’s farms) and Americans were eating more healthy fruits and vegetables than ever before.

More home gardens would offer us victory not only over rising food and healthcare costs, but also foreign oil dependency and climate change. Researcher estimate that locally-grown foods use up to 17 times less climate-warming, fossil fuels than foods from away. And when it comes to local foods, it doesn’t get any “localer” than one’s own yard.

There are different breaks that local, state and federal governments could offer home gardeners. Sales taxes on seeds, seedlings, fruit bushes and trees could be removed. Better still, an income tax break could be administered as is done with home offices where people measure and deduct the square footage of their houses used for business purposes. The bigger your garden, the better the tax break. Those with no yard could deduct the rental fee for a community garden plot.

Tax break or not, I’ll soon be outside fighting climate change, rising food prices, and mosquitoes in my own modest backyard. Last year, my family and I converted our $85 seed order into six months worth of delicious, fresh vegetables. This year, if we’re lucky, that should take us right into winter which in Maine starts in mid November, except for those years when it comes early!

Wishing you bountiful harvests and comfortable footwear this season,

White House Garden Update!

In last month's newsletter, I wrote of the smell of possibility in the air.  This month, I'm smelling something else: success!  Thanks to your support, we managed not only to plant the idea of a kitchen garden on the White House lawn, but moved it into the number one position (i.e. "most popular" and "most discussed") at the website OnDayOne.org.  In case you missed last month's newsletter, you can still vote for the idea by clicking on the image below and, once on the site, "rate this idea":

That success has led to another.  The media and blogosphere are taking note of our effort to inspire the next "landscaper-in-chief".  In fact, there's an article about it in today's New York Times!  Since we worked so well together last month with our "let's all do one thing" approach, I'm going to ask you to do one new thing this month.  Please read the New York Times article online here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/garden/17garden.html

Once you've read it, please find a way to share it with others.  You can send the link on to others through an e-mail or, better still, through the New York Times "e-mail this" button.  If, by chance, you have a direct or indirect contact with staff of any of the presidential campaigns, please find a way to include them in your distribution list.  Thanks!