Victory Gardens Instead of Lawns

Posted on August 6, 2008
Filed Under Ideas, News |

It wouldn’t take much to get used to having no lawn, if you could pick some homegrown veggies and sit in the shade and eat them. You’d rinse them in the Koi pond first, maybe. I’ve been thinking about re-landscaping my back yard, a meditation garden is good, but having some snacks on the vine sitting around too would be even better.

Food is junk in America nowadays, to my taste at least. In my opinion, over the last two decades the price of food should have risen commensurately with everything else, but somehow the prices were kept down, while the quality went to nothing. To me the food distribution chain in America seems completely poisoned - we have only to look at the shape of Americans generally to smell a rat in what we’re eating.

So how to survive in the future? Maybe we could all grow a lot of our own food, and join local co-ops for other staples. I bet we’d start looking more healthy.

Friend of whole food Dr. Alan Greene, whom I’ve cited here before has a nice little video of his tomatoes coming up:

And in San Francisco, City Hall has taken up its vast lawn in front of the Mayor’s office and replaced it with a huge vegetable garden - the Victory Garden:

To John Bela, who designed and managed the garden, it’s also about growing food closer to home.

“In San Francisco, we’re making the big, visible, symbolic gesture here, in an effort to bootstrap urban gardening in the Bay Area and look at the role of urban farming in creating a sustainable food system,” he said.

The garden is also a bridge to history. During World War II, City Hall’s lawns were ripped up and replaced with vegetable plants meant to ease produce shortages. Thousands thronged to a Victory Garden Fair in the park in June 1943.

Sixty-five years later, organizers are predicting as many as 50,000 people will descend on the City Hall area for the Slow Food Nation festival — what they are calling “the largest celebration of American food in history.”
- In San Francisco, replacing lawn with lettuce

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