I can’t believe I missed this! I’m going to have to do some more reading me thinks….

I would LOVE to grow zucchini but the plants are so big.

As for growing on the terrace, the reviews on the potato bins at Gardeners Supply ( http://www.gardeners.com/Potato-Bin/36-629,default,pd.html ) sound like they can accommodate several different kinds of veggies including tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash in addition to the potatoes.

I am going to try growing potatoes on our patio this year in these. Potatoes can leave behind diseases in the garden so I like the idea of keeping them segregated.

How can anybody not like this?

They are going to get only one dinner. Please, they should be able to receive their harvest on a weekly basis, not just one dinner.

I suspect elementary children living in our nation’s capital might take some small patriotic pride in knowing they’re growing vegetables that wind up on the White House menu, served not only to the family of the President of the United States, but to visiting dignitaries and heads of state. I sure would have gotten a kick out of it. But hey, I was a Cub Scout who said the pledge of alligance at the start of every pack meeting. I was probably brainwashed.

The garden is to be planted and tended to by 26 local elementary school kids, who will come back to the White House for a special harvest dinner event. I think the whole thing is a quite nice little project.

I got the impression that this garden was going to be for the WH since Michelle & O’s personal chef will be planning their meals around the vegies grown in the garden.

The kids are going to have only one dinner from the fruits of their labor?

Who is paying the $200 for the seeds? Us taxpayers?

H.R. 875 would establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination.

I read through the bill with particular attention to the sections indicated in the links above. I fail to see in what sense it targets organic farmers and small farm operations for unfair treatment or shows preferential treatment for big corporations. I would expect compliance to require far less effort on the part of organic growers and small farms than of large corporate operations, since the former tend to have all aspects of production and distribution directly under their own control. Small organic operations don’t tend to use enormous quantites of questionable chemicals and food additives; they don’t tend to purchase, process, and distribute produce and ingredients from questionable sources outside of their control that are frequently overseas; they don’t tend to operate industrial scale processing plants employing thousands of people they don’t know; etc. It’s the big-business, industrial scale operations that are going to have to get their acts together.

Accidental contamination of food products through irresponsiblity and neglegence is obviously becoming increasingly common. Thousands have been sickened and many have died as a result. Consumers are expected to buy meat and produce items that don’t even carry labels stating where the stuff came from. A steak might have come from an animal too sick to walk when it arrived at the slaughter house. And there’s the seldom-mentioned matter of the food supply being a wide-open vector for deliberate attack by terrorists. After 8 years of increasingly ineffective regulation, and given the highly questionable origins, contents, and safety of much of the current American food supply, I think modernized legislation like this is long overdue.

we are experiencing a massive erosion of rights on a daily basis and people need to stand up and stop it!