Homeowner Forum / Lawn and Garden / July 2008

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07
/04/whats_growing_at_the_white_house/?page=full

What's growing at the White House?
By Ellen Goodman
July 4, 2008

SCARBOROUGH, Maine

IT HAS BEEN decades since that famous forager Euell Gibbons reached
through the White House fence and picked four edible weeds out of the
president's garden. This is not something that the Secret Service would
recommend you try today.

But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600
Pennsylvania Ave. He's started a campaign to get a kitchen garden
growing on the White House lawn.

Doiron works out of his small Cape house in Maine, where I find him one
summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he's part of the fastest-growing -
I used the word literally - movement in the country. His organization,
Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose chain of
partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but locavores. They
want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in their front and
backyard.

He shows me the lawn sign that expresses his politics: "1,500 Miles, 400
Gallons, Say What?" It's a reference to the average miles food travels
to your plate and the gallons of fuel used in its migration. It's not
the sexiest slogan, but kitchen gardeners are probably as passionate
about vegetables as Republicans are about tax cuts. . . .

-------

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-guerrilla-gard
ening,0,6421881,full.story

Guerrilla gardeners dig in to beautify Los Angeles
By LAURA E. DAVIS, Associated Press Writer
12:20 PM PDT, July 4, 2008

LOS ANGELES -- More than a dozen people, some wearing orange protective
gear, pulled rakes and shovels from a dingy shopping cart and started
working on a parched patch of land along a busy off-ramp of the
Hollywood Freeway.

It was a Saturday night and drivers whooshed past on their way to the
Sunset Strip club scene.

But the crew was undeterred, and by the wee hours, they had transformed
the blight into bloom with green bushes and an array of colorful flowers.

City workers on overtime? Nope, no budget for that. These were
"guerrilla gardeners," a global movement of the grass-roots variety
where people seek to beautify empty or overgrown public space, usually
under the cover of darkness and without the permission of municipal
officials.

"What we're fighting is neglect," said guerrilla gardening guru Richard
Reynolds of London, founder of the Web site guerillagardening.org.

Getting approval to beautify public property can be cumbersome, so
guerrilla gardeners in cities worldwide take matters into their own
dirt-caked hands. . . .

---------

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/35111prs20080430.html

Home : Safe and Free  : Torture
Newly Unredacted Report Confirms Psychologists Supported Illegal
Interrogations In Iraq and Afghanistan (4/30/2008)

Documents Obtained By ACLU Also Uncover "Widespread Use" Of Rescinded
Unlawful Interrogation Techniques And Failure Of Medical Personnel To
Report Abuses

Whoops, wrong news group. Bad on me;o)