Kitchen Garden
3:24 P.M. EDT
MRS. OBAMA: Hey, guys! It’s good to have you here! You guys look great. Hi, everybody! Well, we’re about to do a planting. You know the drill, right?
I’m going to take care of a few housekeeping things to make sure everybody knows what we’re doing. I’ve got notes today because we’re covering a lot. This is an important planting because this is the fifth birthday of Let’s Move!, and we’re celebrating today. And we are doing it by having representatives from all of the Let’s Move! initiatives throughout the country as a real reflection of how many kids and how many families are being impacted.
And I just want to give you a sense of all the programs that are out there around the country. We have representatives from Let’s Move! Active Schools; Let’s Move! Childcare; Let’s Move! Cities and Towns and Communities [Let’s Move! Cities, Towns and Counties]; Let’s Move! Faith and Communities; Let’s Move! Indian Country; Let’s Move! Museums and Gardens; Let’s Move! Outside; Let’s Move! Salad Bars to Schools — way to go. Way to be into it. (Laughter.) Let’s Move! Chefs to Schools, and Let’s Read! Let’s Move!.
So all these sub-initiatives have been developed over the course of this five years, and we’ve got two kids from every initiative who has been, hopefully, positively impacted by one of those initiatives. So we’ve got a lot of new kids here who have never helped us plant. And of course, we’ve got our kids from Bancroft and Tubman who come with us every year. Every season they plant and they harvest. And we’ve got two young people from each — from school. Where are my Bancroft kids? Way to go. Welcome. Where are my Tubman kids? Welcome. It’s good to have you guys.
I also want to thank all the partners who are here today. All of the work you guys have done to keep the initiatives going, it’s really exciting and we’re thrilled to have you here. All our chefs and our National Park folks, you guys are always there with us and it’s good to have you this time around.
We’re also launching a wonderful new map I know that the press was briefed on, which gives you an opportunity to really see the impact that the Let’s Move! initiatives are having. We’re launching that today, and people can go to the website and just check it out. For people who want to know how to get involved in some of these sub-initiatives, what’s going on in your communities, this map is an active way to check that out. And I think most people here were shown a little taste of that map, so I encourage people to go check it out if they want to get involved in Let’s Move! and see what’s going on in their communities.
And last but not least, I’ve been doing this cool thing called the GimmeFive Challenge to help celebrate the birthday. Have you heard about this challenge, young man?
CHILD: Yes.
MRS. OBAMA: You like that granola bar? (Laughter.) It’s a healthy snack. But we’re going to do something this time with the planting. We want to encourage kids, communities, schools who have community gardens out there to join us. I challenge you to plant the five new vegetables that we’re going to be planting here in the garden, which include — do you guys know what the vegetables are? We’ve got broccoli. We’ve got spinach. We’ve got bok choy. We’ve got radishes. What’s the —
CHILD: Lettuce.
MRS. OBAMA: And lettuce. These kids are on it. (Laughter.) So we want to encourage all the kids out there — because we have seen just an increase in community gardens all throughout the country since we planted the beautiful White House Kitchen Garden. So this is a good way to get the country really jiving and working around gardening. You guys like that word? (Laughter.)
So we hope that folks out there will take up the challenge and tell us how their planting is going by hashtag — go on the web and — going to #GimmeFive. Let’s share our progress, because we’re going to come back and harvest in a few months and I’d love to see what other community gardens and schools — school gardens are doing out there to move forward on getting our kids to eat healthy.
So I think that’s all the housekeeping that I have to do. And now it’s time to get to work. Are you guys ready?
CHILDREN: Yes!
MRS. OBAMA: Okay, that’s good. (Laughter.) You guys have your partners? You know where you’re supposed to be?
CHILDREN: Yes.
MRS. OBAMA: All right. Well, let’s move. Let’s get planting. Get it done! (Applause.)
END
3:31 P.M. EDT