The new organic vegetable garden at the White House may be only 1,100 square feet in size, but this small plot has fast become the “shot heard round the country.” It is awakening Americans to the benefits of adding fruits and vegetables to their diets, eliminating processed and sugary foods, and seeing immediate results.

Michelle Obama has made it her mission to help change the way America’s children and families make choices about the foods they eat, to curb the obesity epidemic and to promote a healthier more active lifestyle. And, her first act was to partner with her chef, Sam Kass, to create the first usefully productive garden at the White House in over 100 years. While Eleanor Roosevelt created a small Victory Garden during World War II, it was more inspirational than practical. Thomas Jefferson, the first person in our country to promote seasonal growing, seed saving, and the diversity of crops, changed the way we eat in America. By encouraging his ambassadors to bring back seeds from their travels, he experimented with growing a vast variety of fruits and vegetables at his home, Monticello, and thus introduced a new country to the joys of produce his contemporaries had never experienced. Many of the current White House garden vegetables have been grown from seeds saved from Jefferson’s original stock.

Fifth graders from Bancroft elementary school, who helped plant, weed and harvest the garden on the south lawn in 2009 have visibly changed their eating habits, Mrs. Obama notes. Having experienced picking carrots, harvesting tomatoes, tasting good, clean and fresh food together, they are beginning to change what they eat. She hopes the message spreads, and that families will take the time to sit down together at family meals and make healthier choices about the foods they prepare and eat. If this habit takes root early in a young persons’ life, eating choices will be lifelong healthy ones, she contends.

Beehives created and tended by a White House carpenter, an apiary hobbyist who volunteered his services, were also placed near the south lawn apple trees. One hundred and thirty four pounds of honey have been harvested thus far, and bees pollinating these nearby apple trees have engendered the first fruit blossoms in a generation.

Over 200 pounds of produce emerged from the White House garden in the first 3 months of last season: the yield has now grown to well over 1,000 pounds – of sweet potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, broccoli, fennel, lettuce, rhubarb herbs and other vegetables. Chef Kass harvests from the garden on a daily basis in season, and cooks for the first family, guests and visiting dignitaries from a menu prepared from the garden’s freshest vegetables. He notes that, for an original $200 investment in soil amendments and seeds, there has been an enormous cost benefit.

Across the country, there has occurred a 19% increase in home-based fruit and vegetable gardens and a 30+% increase in seed sales. Most importantly, over 7 million Americans in homes and schools have, in some way, become connected to the joys of gardening and the benefits of fresh produce – new experiences that just may give them better health and prolong their lives. Residents, young and old, in Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow and Irvington are heeding the call and joining together.