Feeding the Hungry With City Hall Gardens
By Vanessa Richins
In the wake of the new White House Vegetable Garden, similar plots are popping up at government buildings around the nation.
One such garden (which they insist was planned before the White House Garden came to be) will be located around the City Hall building in Baltimore, Maryland.
The new Baltimore City Hall Vegetables gardens will be planted where their formal gardens are now located.
It will be almost twice as big as the WH garden, boasting 2000 square feet total.The harvest from the decorative urns, window boxes and raised beds will be donated to Our Daily Bread, a soup kitchen that feeds 700-800 people every day.
The Baltimore Sun interviewed Roger Doiron from Eat the View about this new City Hall vegetable garden. “This news about Baltimore is wonderful news,” said Roger Doiron, founder and director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based nonprofit that advocates for locally grown food and has campaigned for high-profile vegetable gardens. “It will inspire people to rethink the role cities can play in feeding themselves.”
Doiron credits the Obama garden with creating a “domino effect” in the United States. “This is why we pushed so hard for so long,” he said. “We knew [a White House vegetable garden] would have this inspirational potential.”
Indeed - gardens are also planned for the California Statehouse, a 2 acre plot in the middle of Flint, Michigan, at the Maryland Government House, the Town Hall in Kingston, N.Y., and perhaps also by the Governor of Georgia.
Are your local and state governments planting vegetable gardens?
April 26th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
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