Michelle, students dirty hands in White House garden

WASHINGTON: First Lady Michelle Obama hosted a garden-planting party for elementary school students on Thursday, and the garden may start yielding lettuce and spinach for the White House kitchen within weeks.

"Isn't it nice?" Obama said as she and two dozen children from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington planted seedlings into neat rows. "(It's) easier than ripping the grass up."

Designed as a year-round kitchen garden, the 102-sqm plot on the South Lawn is set to produce herbs like oregano, sage and rosemary, vegetables including lettuce, chard and peas, and blueberries and raspberries.

Bancroft students helped break ground for the garden on March 20.

Obama said she hoped the White House garden, the first vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt planted a "victory garden" during World War II, would encourage Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables.

"And doing this garden is a really inexpensive way of making that happen," she said.

"We can produce enough fruits and vegetables to feed us for years and years to come, for just a couple of hundred dollars," she said.

"The lettuce should be ready pretty soon," perhaps in the next week or so, said assistant White House chef Sam Kass. "Spinach in a couple of weeks."

Weeds will be removed by hand and beneficial insects, such as praying mantises and ladybugs, will be used to control pests instead of synthetic pesticides, Kass said. "We're going to make this garden grow."

Some of the crops will be served to the Obamas and to White House staff and guests. Some will be donated to a local soup kitchen.

The students are to return to the White House around the end of the school year for the larger harvest, and to help cook some of the food.

Reuters-AP

(China Daily 04/11/2009 page11)