School gardens have something for everybody
Long before the unpleasantness on Wall Street, we heard talk about "food security" from school-garden mavens in places as disparate as Mill Valley and Richmond's Iron Triangle.
I first advocated this idea 10 years ago and have been pushing it, and documenting it, here in Yamhill County, Oregon ever since I moved here five years ago.
We need Community Victory Garden FoodSheds at every Head Start, Elementary, Middle, and High School in America, which will function in five capacities:
- Community Victory Gardens for the students, teachers, administrators, and their families - year round, built on a hybridized pattern - a marriage of - Community Gardens with Victory Gardens.
- Farmers Markets with richly diverse crops, which will raise money for the schools, train future local farmers, and provide localized seed-saving and propagating hubs.
- Living Laboratories on a shoe string where you can teach math, chemistry, physics, botany, biology, etymology, mycology, meteorology, literature, history, civics, business, shop, etc etc.
- FoodShed Security Hubs which will help to decentralize and secure food supplies locally. This idea is not new at all - Alexander the Great, the Caesars of Rome, and Napoleon, among others, *all* exhorted their people to keep their own small patches of food.
- Serve as hubs for converting private yards, then city & county parks, then the land around and in front of every civic building (police stations, courthouses, city halls, community centers, churches, jails, etc.) and finally every Hell strip to be found, into Victory Permagardens.
McMinnville, OR
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