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1873 – Gardens surrounding the Indian Pueblo of Zuni

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Photographer: T. H. O’Sullivan. Expedition of 1873.
Larger image here.

“Prior to the coming of the Europeans, the Zuni people were skilled and successful farmers. Their villages and fields were situated in the best areas for cultivation of their crops. They originally grew corn, beans and squash. Later, they added European crops such as wheat and peaches. One type of garden they cultivated was the “waffle garden”. Waffle gardens were built close to the village and the river and were a type of ‘kitchen garden’.”

Sowing Seeds of Zuni Tradition
By Susan Montoya Bryan
June 22, 2003 LA Times

Zuni waffle gardens.

Pueblo of Zuni web site here.

October 3, 2008   No Comments

Victory Garden Day, April 1st, 1918

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Photo: Boy Scouts at attention — staircase, rotunda, City Hall. (Victory Garden day, April 1st, 1918.) The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley.
See larger image here.

Although we associate victory gardens with World War II, Laura Lawson says the term was actually coined near the end of World War I, replacing the more commonly used “war garden.” This, after all, was the conflict in which sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage.”

Lawson’s book describes the festivities on April 1, 1918, designated by the mayor as War Garden Day in San Francisco. The Chronicle editorialized that “the first food gun of the nation” had been fired.

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October 3, 2008   No Comments

Gardens for Life

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Photo: Nyandarva boarding primary school in Kenya, Rift Valley Province.
© 2004 Didier Ruef

“Over 20,000 children and young people, 400 teachers, with many families and communities (we estimate about 50,000 people in total) in four continents in four continents have participated in garden-based teaching and learning and community action and have come to generate new ways of learning about, and living in, an uncertain modern world.”

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October 3, 2008   No Comments