The Guy From the Front Yard Sat Down With a President

Black cell-tray flats filled with young tomato, tomatillo, and pepper seedlings, each cell marked with a handwritten plant label.
This year's babies: tomatoes, tomatillos, and a whole lineup of peppers, started in the Epic trays I will not shut up about.

Y’all, I have to share something that made my whole week.

Kevin Espiritu, who founded Epic Gardening, just did a collaboration with the Obama Foundation: a full tour of the edible gardens at the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, plus a sit-down with President Obama about the thinking behind the place. If you’ve been around here a while, you know Epic is a cornerstone of how I garden; it’s the very first thing on my What I Use page – that picture up top is my seedlings this year in Epic seed starter cubes. I’ve followed Kevin since he was one guy filming in his front yard, so watching him go from that to talking gardens with a former president is the kind of thing that just makes my heart happy.

But here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

The standout, by Kevin’s telling and mine, is the Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit & Vegetable Garden. And what a perfectly chosen name. During World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden right on the White House lawn, over the actual objections of the USDA, which worried it would spook the food industry. She did it anyway. At their peak, Victory Gardens grew something close to 40% of the vegetables in this country; ordinary people, growing food for each other, on whatever patch they had. Decades later Michelle Obama picked that same thread back up with the White House Kitchen Garden. So a civic center that puts an edible garden (accessible beds, a picnic area, a real Garden Classroom and Teaching Kitchen) right at the heart of the campus isn’t decoration. It’s a through-line about food as a public, shared, democratic thing. Which, if you’ve read me for five minutes, you know is a hill I will happily garden on.

A 1945 U.S. War Food Administration poster reading “Your Victory Garden Counts More Than Ever!”, with an oversized open green pea pod surrounded by tomatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, and potatoes, and a small garden scene in the background.
The government once put this on posters and meant it. Some things we relearn every generation. (“Your Victory Garden Counts More Than Ever!”, Hubert Morley, U.S. War Food Administration, 1945; public domain.)

There’s a nerdier detail I loved too. Kevin talked about the “nurse logs” they used: logs from trees felled during construction, laid into the new beds to inoculate the fresh soil with the local microbial life. They built the garden’s future out of the trees that had to come down to make room for it. I think that’s just beautiful, and very much how I want to think about gardens (and, honestly, most things).

I won’t pretend the timing is an accident for me. It’s been a heavy stretch, and it did something good for my chest to watch a creator I’ve loved for years point his platform at something this decent, and to see a project this hopeful actually get built and opened. Rage and joy aren’t opposites; they’re the same care pointed two directions. Some weeks you need the reminder that people are still out there building the good thing.

The Center’s open now (campus daily, 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., on Stony Island Ave in Chicago). If you’re anywhere near, go walk the gardens; I’d give a lot to. Kevin’s full tour video is coming, so I’ll drop the link here the second it lands.

Go forth and plant something. Somebody has to grow the good thing.

P.S. Yes, the seed-starting trays I rave about on the What I Use page are Epic’s. Five years old, still like new, still going through the dishwasher every spring. Buy good trays once.

P.P.S. I may or may not be planning an entire vacation weekend around visiting the Obama Center campus. Yes, I’m that kind of political and gardening and history nerd. Sorry, not sorry.