The White House garden, a project of First Lady Michelle Obama's East Wing, was planted last April. As of Thursday, when Mrs. Obama presided over the fall harvest, it had produced 963 pounds of food.

When the grades come in on President Obama's first year in office -- and next Wednesday marks the anniversary of his election -- the garden on the South Lawn should get an A (as in arugula) because it was one heck of a good idea.

The garden has been great PR for Mrs. Obama, providing a non-controversial, picturesque backdrop to talk about her inter-related issues -- healthy eating, exercise, obesity, eating locally produced food, plugging the Obama health reform plan pending in Congress and opening up the White House to the community.

"The planting of this garden was one of the first things I wanted to do as first lady here at the White House," Mrs. Obama said on June 16, at an earlier harvest. At the Sept. 17 opening of a farmers' market near the White House, Mrs. Obama said the garden was "one of the greatest things I've done in my life so far."

The garden is Mrs. Obama's signature project. As she said in her farmers' market speech: "It's important to know that when I travel around the world, no matter where I've gone so far, the first thing world leaders, prime ministers, kings, queens ask me about is the White House garden. And then they ask about Bo. Everybody, it's the garden and Bo, or Bo and the garden, one or the other."

Mrs. Obama envisioned the garden as an educational tool, and local school children have been involved since ground-breaking in March. The garden is also an element in many of her speeches, the topic of a White House video and the setting for an episode of TV's "The Biggest Loser," where contestants came to the South Lawn to pick some vegetables and then get a lesson from White House chefs on turning them into a healthy meal. Mrs. Obama will be showing the Muppets how to garden when she appears Nov. 10 in the season premiere of "Sesame Street."

Mrs. Obama reminded the students on Thursday that prior to the project's start, "this garden wasn't here before. Nothing was here. This was grass, like everything else. So we thought, well, wouldn't it be great if we could use this garden to talk about the importance of healthy eating and what good, fresh foods taste like?"

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The garden yields food that the First Family and White House guests eat, with surplus produce given away. Much of the food harvested on Thursday was donated to Miriam's Kitchen, which provides healthy meals and other services to Washington's homeless.

Mrs. Obama donned black gloves to help dig up produce on Thursday; in all, 223 pounds was harvested, with Bancroft Elementary School students helping to fill a wheelbarrow with sweet potatoes. The harvest also included broccoli, turnips, fennel, eggplant, peppers and carrots.

She told the students it cost less than $200 to launch the garden -- about $120 to get the soil ready and about $55 for the seeds -- but key to its success is how well it is tended, and she did not a price tag on that, or the beehive nearby, which allows the bees an easy commute to the plants they were tasked with pollinating.

So this is a bit of an overstatement: "For less than two hundred dollars, we have planted enough food to feed not just the folks at the White House, but we've also given a lot of food to some of our neighbors, and we're going to do that today."

First daughters Sasha and Malia had earlier picked sweet potatoes, Mrs. Obama told the kids.

She also gave a shout-out to Jim Adams, the White House chief horticulturalist.

"Do you know what a horticulturalist does, or what he did for this garden? He really was responsible for how productive this garden was, because, you know, we sort of know a little bit of something about gardening, but how do you know what to plant where, and what's going to grow well here in this soil?" Mrs. Obama said.

"Well, Jim helped us figure out where to put things, how to make it beautiful and to make sure that the food was going to grow, and we were going to get the right types of fruits at the right period of the season."

Sam Kass, an assistant White House chef and food initiative coordinator, told me there have been four plantings of lettuce, and that the garden can grow something all four seasons in the Washington climate.

Mrs. Obama, then, will continue to have much to reap from this project.


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