WASHINGTON – First lady Michelle Obama planted the sixth annual White House Kitchen Garden on Wednesday, promoting her campaign for healthy eating and farm-to-table operations in schools and communities across the country.
This year’s garden is a pollinator garden filled with flowers that attract bees and butterflies. Obama admitted her daughters don’t like bees, but explained to the local students in attendance that bees do more than sting people.
If you don’t have inspects and great pollinators to pollinate the plants,” she said, “it could affect our ability to grow things, and that would be a problem.”
Obama planted seeds, helped about two dozen students from Washington elementary schools till the soil and supervised watering plants, chatting with local students as they worked. “You know who really likes broccoli?” she asked a student while watering the broccoli plot, “The president.”
FoodCorps members, part of the nationwide organization that helps create school gardens, worked with White House chefs and kitchen staff to help the students plant vegetables such as collard greens, broccoli and raspberries.
This year’s additions to the garden include Lincoln oats and a pawpaw tree, an indigenous fruit tree. “The garden really guides what we cook, “ said White House Assistant Chef Sam Kass. “In a few weeks we’ll be able to come down and see what we have.”
After the planting was finished, Obama thanked the students for helping create what will eventually be part of White House healthy menus.
“They pull things out of that garden every day,” she said. “We pick it up, we take it out, and we eat it.”