In honor of the Fourth of July, here’s an infographic map of the new Presidential garden (via Good magazine) — click through to enlarge:

(image courtesy Good Magazine)

As a recent New York transplant, I have been wanting to resurrect my green thumb for some time, but I find myself slightly overwhelmed by the difficulty of finding a community garden with open plots.  I’ve heard stories of people waiting for more than five years for a plot to open–with wait times like that, it would probably be easier to get a kidney.

Using the most recent database I could find, my husband and I located some gardens in our neighborhood and the surrounding areas.  We set out to scout, filled with hope and excitement. The first garden was right down our block. It’s called the RING (The Riverside-Inwood Neighborhood Garden) and while it’s a wonderful community effort, we discovered it was strictly a flower garden, so we had to move on.  Much to our disappointment, garden after garden was either boarded up or abandoned. Six gardens in all were closed or had vanished.

I could only assume that my research had been poor, but after digging a little deeper I discovered that many of New York’s community gardens are at risk of either encroaching commercial development or simple neglect due to a lack of community support.

We came home defeated, stopping for a quart of strawberries to lift our spirits.  Washing away the dirt from our fruit, I began to question my idea of finding a plot.  Sure, it would be great to find an already established and flourishing garden where I could plant tomatoes and kale to share with family and friends, but how many people would benefit from that? Could I possibly do more?  I thought of the boarded-up gardens again and their depressed neighborhoods.

Perhaps there is still a need for a resurrection, and I decided to redirect my research.  I’m not exactly sure how to go about organizing a community garden, but I am open to education from anyone with experience.  In the meantime, we have joined a local community-activist group and bought a small tomato plant for our windowsill.

Leah Brickley, Recipe Tester

Mid-June in the garden is a thriving time, when flowering tomato, pepper and squash plants give signs of good things to come. In the meantime, I’m thankful for an early harvest that provided handfuls of radishes for summer salads — and, just this week, lots of little beans in every size and shape. English peas, sugar snaps, and haricots verts  quickly blanched in salted water and shocked in ice water make a perfect side for any lunch or dinner. I like them with (or even inside) an omelet, or tossed with some fruity olive oil, cannellini beans, radishes, and snipped herbs for a protein-packed picnic salad.

Here are a few other fast & fabulous bean recipes for your summer table:

• Green Beans & Shallots
• Snow Pea & Avocado Slaw
• Three Bean Salad
• Green Bean & Egg Salad

Sarah Copeland, Recipe Developer and Good Food Gardens spokesperson

As a kid, I looked forward to three things about my summer trips to my grandparents’ 160-acre Iowa farm: hiding out with my favorite book in the abandoned chicken coop, letting the calves suck my thumb, and feeding piglet runts from a baby bottle. Other than that, I thought everything about farm life was utterly uncool. The infamous swine smell, the coffee cans of rendered pork fat, and early-morning chores. Those things gave me the heebie-jeebies. I never dreamed that the habits of my grandparents, like collecting kitchen scraps for compost or putting up green beans for the winter, would be ones that I adopt, embrace, even exalt.

So I’ve grown up a little. And embraced my farm heritage. And experienced my first recession. It seems the rest of the country is right there with me—we’ve all grown up a little, and are finally seeing farming for what it really is—challenging, necessary and beautiful.

It doesn’t hurt that farmers, food journalists and chefs have laid the groundwork of making farm-to-table the chicest catch-phrase of the decade. So it won’t hurt for me to use that phrase just one more time—farm-to-table starts with you, in your own backyard (or fire escape, or windowsill). You don’t have to own overalls or piglets to embrace your inner farmer. Just a pot, some dirt, and a few seeds. And go ahead and collect your kitchen scraps while you’re at it. Ask a neighbor or a farmer at your local market if you can add them to their compost pile, or better yet, start your own.

Watch for more tips on how to get started when our second episode in our Good Food Gardens series airs this Friday.

Sarah Copeland, Recipe Developer and Good Food Gardens spokesperson

I hate to be dismal and risk ruining my Pollyanna reputation, but with a record 32.5 million Americans on food stamps, and more American families facing hunger for the first time in their lives, food insecurity is a very real part of the American fabric.

The Victory gardens of the early 1940s, inspired by wartime need and promoted by a Department of Agriculture campaign, proved that many folks are willing to dig in and become a part of the solution through growing their own food.

The government is now at it again, with a Victory garden on the White House lawn and a People’s Garden on USDA soil, soil that was blacktop just a few months ago. Yesterday, in our nation’s capital, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack lent his own green thumb to support our fourth Good Food Garden, at the SEED School, a pioneering charter school in DC. He led the students, our new Good Food Ambassadors, in planting cucumbers, squash, eggplant and artichokes, among dozens of other plants, and joined us in tasting some of the varieties of melons, tomatoes and herbs that the students will grow.

One of our Good Food Garden Ambassadors with her prized zucchini plant

While Good Food Gardens are intended to teach and inspire interest in where food comes from, give students valuable skills and growing methods, and encourage students to eat a larger variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, their larger message is that anyone, anywhere, can grow their own food, becoming part of Secretary Vilsack and President Obama’s goal to end childhood hunger by 2015. The Food Network and Share Our Strength share their mission.

He left us with these words:

“The first directive President Obama gave me when I came into office was this: Feed our children; and feed them well.”

We hear you, Mr. President.

Check out Goodfoodfun.com for more about the Good Food Gardens, and a few ideas how you can feed your children well too.

Sarah Copeland, Recipe Developer and Good Food Gardens Spokesperson

If you’ve been reading the Good Food Gardens blog, you’ve probably figured out that I consider gardening the best way to get free food. Not only does food you grow yourself cost virtually nothing after the initial investment of soil and seeds, it’s also the surest way to have quality, locally grown ingredients and make sure that the things you love to eat are always available to you.

Of course, you can’t grow chardonnay smoked sea salt or vanilla beans in your backyard (although I’d love to hear about it if you are), but you can grow a huge variety of lettuces, vegetables, and herbs — exactly the kinds of garden goodies that make it easy to layer summer meals with texture and flavor. Farmers’ markets are also superb, and I still count on real farmers to do the heavy lifting, but even they can’t beat the ease and freshness of picking greens from the garden just hours before dinner.

So you live in a tiny apartment in a big city with no light or backyard? Trust me, you can do it. We’ve proven that anyone can grow a garden by planting one, tended by school-aged kids, between high-rises in the middle of New York City. Okay, my can-do attitude is made significantly easier by the help of Teich Garden Systems, who build our Good Food Gardens, but my own little plot of dirt at the Two Coves Community Garden in Long Island City should be even more convincing. My garden, now packed with strawberries, lemon verbena, rhubarb, Hungarian peppers, and over 10 varieties of lettuces and leafy greens, started out as a packed plot of dead soil just a year ago. Its success is the result of several bags of organic compost tilled into the soil, a few sunny weekends with a shovel, and the occasional rain dance.

Probably the easiest and most prolific garden doesn’t even require a plot of soil at all. The Earth Box, used in schools in Harlem, rooftops in Chicago, and by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for a international program called the Growing Connection, requires little more than an upfront investment and the desire to grow food—a lot of food. 4 to 6 boxes, some say, can feed a family of four for a summer.

So, what’s your excuse now?

Sarah Copeland, Recipe Developer and Good Food Gardens Spokesperson

Sometimes, when I’m overcome with the heady aroma of a 26-pound Thanksgiving turkey cooking in the middle of May (occupational hazard), my mind wanders out the window and into the nearest garden. Today, this daydreaming was made easy by the arrival of the Seed Savers Exchange Catalog. The catalog is a 101-page testament to the work of the Seed Savers Exchange, an organization that works tirelessly to protect, promote and share our country’s valuable farming heritage.

Specifically, they’re dedicated to preserving the thousands of heirloom varieties of flora that date back before the turn of the 20th century. And they’re a close ally of the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, where we will be planting our next Good Food Garden this June as part of their summer-long Edible Gardens exhibit.

Heirloom varieties, much like heritage breed animals (like the Berkshire pig or Bourbon Red turkey), are a window into the history of food, marking a vegetable’s migration, immigration and crosspollination from land to land with their names and stories.

The catalog includes 6,200 kinds of tomatoes, 5,100 varieties of beans, and 2,400 peppers. But it isn’t the sheer numbers that delight me. It reads like an epic storybook whose heroes like Russian Giant (garlic) and Hungarian Heart (tomato) live in utopian harmony with the King of the North (pepper) and Sultan’s Golden (beans). And that’s just the beginning of the Edenic paradise. Seed Savers houses the seeds of flowers in every shape and shade, 200 vintage varieties of grapes and 700 different antique apple varieties.

As they say in the catalog, “not bad for a program that started as a little garden in mid-Missouri.” Not bad at all.

Sarah Copeland, Recipe Developer & Good Food Gardens Spokesperson

These are fresh chickpeas. We found them in the market downstairs from us for $1.99/pound, so we thought we could afford to experiment with these delicious and nutritious spring legumes. Here’s what we learned:

First start by shelling them (the pods aren’t edible) and then have some fun. They’re good tossed raw into a salad, or steamed for your favorite hummus recipe, or steamed and tossed with butter and parsley, or sautéed with some pancetta and onions and served over pasta with pecorino, or used anywhere you’d use fresh peas. If you like edamame, toss these in good quality extra virgin olive oil and sea salt, then eat them straight out of the pod.

Store them in the refrigerator for up to a week — they do dry out quickly, so it’s best to eat them while fresh.

Claudia Sidoti, Recipe Developer

I’m not sure if anyone saw this in the news yesterday, but the Obamas have hired Chicago chef Sam Kass to cook for them in the White House. Sam Kass is known to be an advocate for healthy and local eating and has taken up some public health issues like school lunches and obesity. It’s not a victory garden on the White House grounds, but hopefully it’ll keep Alice Waters happy.

Shirley Fan, Nutritionist

Our main produce vendor offered to send over some samples of heirloom apples. I’ve always loved apples, and I’ve been getting more and more excited about the growing variety of apples out there, as there really is such a huge difference in taste and texture.

The good news is that our sales rep brought 3 varieties: Black Oxford, Roxbury Russet, and Blue Pearmain.

The bad news is that there were only 4 of each variety.

I immediately ran to look online to see what info I could find on each apple. As it turns out, Blue Pearmain are excellent for baking, Roxbury Russets are old cider apples that are also good eaten as-is, and Black Oxfords are supposed to be good just eaten out of hand.

Well, it was exciting to try these centuries-old varieties that almost went extinct, but nothing jumped out at me and screamed “let’s buy more now!”

I turned away mildly disappointed and looked at what remained. Since it was mid-afternoon with the weekend fast approaching and 1 or 2 of each variety now gone to tasting, there was only one thing left for any chef to do: make applesauce!

I wanted to let the unique flavors of each apple shine through, so I added just a pinch of cinnamon and a few tablespoons of sugar, cooked them slowly for 30 minutes, passed them through a food mill, and wow, some of the best applesauce I’ve had in years!

I can’t wait to try more varieties!

Rob Bleifer, Executive Chef