A Ventura County UC Cooperative Extension master composter, Lorraine Rubin, wrote a guest column published in the Ventura County Star over the weekend about the increasing popularity of food gardening. She attributed growth in the age-old hobby to high food costs, job losses, hunger, concerns about food quality, climate change and dwindling energy supplies.
Rubin wrote that the acting county director in the Ventura office, Rose Hayden-Smith, is a nationally recognized leader in the effort to boost home gardening. Hayden-Smith, Rubin wrote in the article, "has been crisscrossing the nation giving speeches, granting interviews and blogging like crazy to push the message that our country needs to invest, once again, in local gardening."
The story reported that Hayden-Smith wrote a letter to the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture suggesting a victory garden conference be convened in Washington, D.C., this spring, using as a model the National War Garden Defense Conference held there in 1941, less than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The conference, Hayden-Smith suggested, could outline how a national victory garden program could once again offer food security to Americans by supporting edible gardens in our schools, homes, workplaces and communities.