At its Earth Day celebration today, the USDA will share expanded plans for a People's Garden at the department's Washington Mall headquarters that will encompass all of the facility's grounds, according to an article in the Washington Post. The plan includes a 1,300-square-foot organic vegetable garden, ornamental flower gardens and bioswales (mini-wetlands designed to reduce pollution and surface water runoff).
According to the Post story, written by Jane Black, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack got the idea to include the entire six-acre facility in his plans on one of his daily runs on the Mall. Originally, he planned a small vegetable garden in Washington and some type of garden at every USDA facility across the country. The positive public response to the idea and a March meeting with horticulture and garden groups convinced him to broaden the plan, he told the reporter.
One of the people at that March meeting was UC Cooperative Extension's own Rose Hayden-Smith, the director of the Ventura County office and an enthusiastic advocate for the resumption of a national Victory Garden movement. Victory Gardens were an important source of vegetables for Americans during World War II.
Black quoted Hayden-Smith in her article:
"I kept having to pinch myself in this meeting. We're not the kind of people who have been invited to Washington, D.C., before. We're the guerrilla gardeners, the pollinator people, the seed savers. It wasn't our usual cast of characters. People were grinning from ear to ear."
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