Happy St. Patrick’s day! And top ‘o the mornin’ to you. We’re excited about the party we’re planning for the Irish Prime Minister tonight. Normally we don’t celebrate holidays honoring Catholic saints (other than St. Teddy Kennedy that is) butt because this feast day is “green” it fits our re-election template perfectly.
And speaking of green: yes. Yesterday was the day we’ve all been waiting for: Lady M’s third historic planting of the Big White organic garden of good (blueberries) and evil (beets and broccoli.)
"Uh oh, the president doesn't like beets. But it's okay, we're an equal opportunity garden."
And then we moved on to the “c’s” cabbage, cauliflower, collards and chard. Planting everything from “a” (arugula, Big Guy’s favorite) to “z” zucchini ( good in chocolate zucchini bread, Lady M’s fave), this was not just a lesson in healthy eating and urban farming, butt a special tutorial in spelling. The kids who came to help with the planting got extra credit in English class, or, as the case may be, “English as a second language,” class.
Squatting while doing our plotting
We didn’t miss a “beet” in our on-going healthy eating campaign:
Obama encouraged the kids who helped her plant the fruits and veggies to urge their parents and grandparents to serve them at the dinner table.
Cuz without Lady M’s reminder, you know, nobody’s parent or grandparent would ever think of serving fruits and vegetables to kids.
The seedlings all arrived in little pots from a secret stash of heirloom seeds which are direct descendents of Thomas Jefferson’s original diversified garden patch at Monticello.
“The veggies were sprouted in the White House greenhouse in an "undisclosed location,"
Actually, the “undisclosed location” is the same place we grow Big Guy’s weed, butt you did not hear that from me. Nor can I disclose it’s location, butt little Mo wandered into it once by mistake and we didn’t hear from him for days. Don’t worry, he’s fine now.
Lettuce. Right.
Anyway, we spent about 15 minutes posing with the kids (who didn’t seem to have fat behinds) and plants.
Lady M has grown so enamored of her organic garden spot (“It's been one of the greatest things I’ve done in my life so far.") that she’s decided to write a whole book about it! Cuz plunking little plants in the ground is just so special. And hard to do without proper instruction.
Mrs Obama said: "We've gotten food out of the garden, and we can eat it and it's good.”
"So we wanted to share the story with the rest of the nation and perhaps with the rest of the world, because we get so many questions about the garden: How did we do it? Why did we do it? How do I do this in my own home or community?"
Because of Lady M’s heavy schedule, she’ll be using a ghost writer to help with the actual writing of the book. Same goes for the organic garden: we’ve hired ghost workers to do all the heavy lifting. I think that means the workers are undocumented voters forced to “live in the shadows.” Although they’re usually right out in the mid-day sun, so it’s possible I’m confused on that.
Now that we have the veggies tucked in for the growth season, we just have to wait till it gets a little warmer to plant our annual butterfly garden. Something went awry last year and our crop failed to thrive – an occupational hazard around here – so we didn’t have a harvest of butterflies for last year’s Halloween party like we did the year before. We suspected Monarch sabotage, and will be guarding against it this year.
Strangely,at this year’s spring planting we skipped the Gaia worship that we held during last years “Getting Back to our Roots” spring ceremony. I guess Chef Kass’ rhubarb dance was a little over the top and didn’t test so well in our post-planting polling. So this year we just saluted our garden queen and let it go at that.
Dressed for spring showers in our rain jacket and rain hair: both made of Gortex to shed water
I know you’re also interested in all of the critical events occurring on the international disaster front. At the risk of sounding cynical, it’s actually been beneficial to have all the natural and man-mad disasters stealing eyeballs this week. Otherwise people might focus on the the fact that inflation (quantitative easing) has fired up to Jimmy Carter levels and the housing market registered the steepest decline since 1984. Only in Washington could this be read as a postitve part of the WTF campaign.
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