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By Eric Thomas
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — How would you like to have all the benefits of a backyard vegetable garden without having to do all the weeding, trimming and labor yourself? A San Francisco company is tapping into the growing number of people who want their food grown locally, but with someone else providing the elbow grease. >> Read the full story
Fiskars Project Orange Thumb, the Home Depot Foundation, and the City of Baltimore are teaming to make over an area in a local Baltimore neighborhood in just one day. This Thursday, 80 members from all three groups and people from around the community will build a new garden in the Oliver neighborhood. They will break ground at 8 a.m. and complete the project just in time for the ribbon cutting that will take place at 4:30 that afternoon.
Before you turn over the first spade of dirt for your new veggie garden, you’ll want to take stock of your equipment. Spades, shovels, picks — these things tend to accumulate in garages and storage closets, and you’ve probably got some already. If you’ve done any flower gardening or have potted plants, you also likely have a watering can that can be used in the veggie patch.
But when it comes to hoses and watering equipment, there are some special considerations when growing food.
With all the recent polls and pronouncements about the growth of home veggie gardens, I’m itching to expand mine. Yet this year, and every year, I am confronted with a deceptively soft, but decidedly stubborn foe: the lawn.
We could wax on about the American lawn, that great, lush, water-chugging emblem of good times and expansive living. But let’s not. Right now, it stands in the way of growing more snap peas.
I have peeled up turf to create garden and flower beds (actually I’ve directed this work, at which my husband is surprisingly good!). But we’ve wound up with lawn re-emerging from underneath and creeping in from alongside the plot. This problem is especially acute here in Texas where many lawns feature Bermuda grass, an invasive turf that tolerates little competition and will send out runners to evade borders.
You’ve probably heard that efforts to persuade the Obamas to turn over some turf to a veggie garden have been victorious: the first family will be planting a “Victory Garden” on the South Lawn.
Technically, it won’t be a “Victory” garden per se, but will be the first food-producing garden to grace the White House compound since Eleanor Roosevelt oversaw a real Victory Garden during WWII.
Still, it’s a victory for local foodies and specifically Eat the View, the prime perpetrator of this movement to turn back the grass and turn up the turnips, which is now asking folks to thank the Obamas via a form at their website.
