White House Garden Yields Lots of Greens
By Rachel L. Swarns
Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images First Lady Michelle Obama harvested vegetables with students from Bancroft Elementary School.After weeks of digging and planting, watering and weeding, it was harvest time on Tuesday in the White House garden.
First Lady Michelle Obama was joined by a group of elementary school students who harvested 73 pounds of lettuce, 12 pounds of snap peas and one cucumber from the vegetable patch. (The garden also produced beans, kale, collards, broccoli and chard.)
“Today is the culmination of a lot of hard work,” Mrs. Obama told the students from Bancroft Elementary School, who started working on the garden with her in March.
The first lady started the garden in an effort to highlight the importance of nutrition and healthy living. And on Tuesday, she and the students used some of their newly-picked bounty to prepare a freshly cooked meal.
In the White House kitchen, some children prepared breaded chicken for baking; others shelled peas; and yet another group chopped onions for brown rice. Outside, the children washed the various types of lettuce — red oakleaf, green leaf and lola rossa.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Mrs. Obama later shelled snap peas with White House Associate Chef Sam Kass.White House Associate Chef Sam Kass emphasized that no fertilizer or herbicides had been used in the garden. He said the soil was fortified with crab meal from the Chesapeake Bay, green sand compost and lime powder. He said that Bo, the family dog, had not eaten any of the vegetables though he noted that “something is nibbling a little bit on the kale.”
After their work, the first lady and students sat down at a table on the White House lawn and ate the fruits of their labor.
The White House has also donated produce from the garden to Miriam Kitchen, a soup kitchen for the homeless.
