Reporter Eddie Quezada of KESQ-TV interviewed gardener Brian Desborough, who said his small plot yields about 100 pounds of heirloom tomatoes, vegetables that often go for $5 a pound at supermarkets.
UC Cooperative Extension vegetable crops advisor Jose Luis Aguiar noted in his interview the psychological benefits of gardening.
"It's nothing better than coming out and spending a couple hours moving the soil, moving the vegetables around, watering, trimming them, nothing better than that and the added benefit is you get to pick your own vegetables which are always the best because they are fresh," Aguiar said.
All of the Santa Rosa Community Garden's 200 plots are being cultivated by local gardeners, and a waiting list for space there has been maintained for three years, Quezada reported.
Jose Luis Aguiar
A reporter at the Ventura County Star, Lisa McKinnon, did some detective work recently trying to substantiate a hunch about gophers. Her theory appeared in the third paragraph of a story published today: "Landscapers and gardeners alike say the local gopher population this year is one of the biggest, and possibly the most hungry, they have seen."
Evidence included in the story:
“I’ve definitely noticed more gophers this year on the trails. It looks like Swiss cheese out there.” - volunteer UC Master Gardener Dani Brusius
“It does seem to be a little busier this year than in the past." - Jeremy Patton, supervising manager for the pest management company GopherMan
And deniers:
"The number of gopher holes in the county’s regional parks is no higher this year than in the past." McKinnon paraphrased Ron Van Dyck, deputy director of the Ventura County Parks Department
No one would disagree that just one gopher can do a lot of backyard damage. The story includes a number of control options and many readers posted comments with gopher eradication strategies of their own. The article also steers readers to reliable information on gopher management: UC Cooperative Extension. A side bar with the article includes the URL for the Ventura County UC Master Gardener program and a direct link to the UC IPM Pest Note on gophers.
Have you noticed more gophers this year than in the past? Yes or no, please post a comment.
Pocket gopher.
The San Diego Union-Tribune ran an article today about the uncertain future of a popular community garden. The Santee community garden is on the grounds of the community's county-owned Edgemoor Hospital. Patients are being moved from the facility and most of the buildings are slated for demolition.
Two UC Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners are quoted in the story, 85-year-old Joyce Gemmell, and Judy Jacoby, the co-chair of the San Diego County Master Gardener Association's community gardening committee.
Gemmell, who lives in a mobile home, tends one of the community garden's 30 plots, producing corn, squash and other produce for herself and the Santee Food Bank.
"I've always been a gardener," she was quoted in the article. "I'm the old generation – growing food is important to me."
Jacoby commented on the popularity of community gardens in San Diego County. She said some gardens have stopped adding names to their wait lists because of high demand.
“There is a huge, huge interest,” she told reporter Michelle Clock.
Changing the way people look at food was one of the goals of this month's Symposium On Sustainable Agriculture at UC Davis, an event covered by Sacramento ABC affiliate News 10. The report included an interview with conference participant Lia Huber of the Nourish Network. Huber pointed out that people interact with food at least three times a day.
"People in our rushed society try to get through meals as quickly as possible. When we garden, or go to a farmers market, we have these personal interactions with the land and people who are producing our food. There are ways to connect with food to make the experience much richer," Huber said.
The television report also included an interview with Margaret Llyod, a UC Davis graduate student who was named one of three "White House Farmers" by whitehousefarmer.com. Llyod maintains a garden at UC Davis that provides free greens to anyone who brings a salad bowl. In order to eat fresher food, she said, it must be grown where we work and live.
"There is a great sense of pride when you've grown something yourself. It begins to have a domino effect in your life...how we make our food choices and how we nourish ourselves," Lloyd told the reporter.
Lloyd was among 111 "nominees" to be "White House Farmer." The Web site tallied 56,000 votes during February polling.
The White House farmer project was one of several movements launched by grass roots groups to encourage the new administration to make changes in how food is grown and distributed in the U.S.
In March, a 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden was established on the White House south lawn.
"People were so excited about our First Family growing a White House farm," Lloyd said in the News 10 story. "Within a day (of my nomination), the media was interested. It spoke loudly to people and they were very interested in a White House farm."
The senior public information representative for UC's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, Lyra Halprin, said she isn't sure that the people's-choice honor means anything specific, "but I'm sure it contributed to the excitement and buildup and pressure to really do this."
Margaret Lloyd waters the Salad Bowl Garden at UC Davis.
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."
The USDA's Peoples Garden plan.
