Join Us In Our Victory Garden

By Anthony Todd in Food on May 14, 2010 4:20PM

We've been talking the locavore talk for years, advocating local produce, farmer's markets, freezing your own food and gardening. But here is our dirty little secret: we've never put a seed in the ground in our entire life. Never. We've read all the books about young hipsters becoming organic farmers, and acted like we knew what we were doing, but it was all a bluff. No more!

The Peterson Garden Project is an organic, community vegetable garden on the corner of Peterson and Campbell in Chicago’s 40th Ward. This is its first growing season, and organizers are gearing up to get started right now. During the Victory Garden boom of 1942-45, Chicago was the gardening capital of the United States. Children grew vegetables on 14,000 plots of Park District land, the largest victory garden in the country was on the north side and 172,000 Victory gardens sprouted throughout the city. Most heartening? Ninety percent of those gardeners, just like us, had never gardened before.

So, join us! We'll post periodic updates on our (possibly successful, possibly comical) efforts to create vegetables, but the best way to get involved is to get yourself a plot. For $45, you get a 4' X 6' raised bed filled with new organic soil, and access to their community of gardeners and online forums. (Full disclosure - we bought our plot before we told anyone, but as of this writing, there are still plots available). The Peterson Garden Project is hosting a fundraiser this Thursday, May 20th. Themed towards the Victory Garden, there will be Swing dancing lessons, a 1940s costume contest, a bake sale and a silent auction. Tickets are $19.42.