WASHINGTON • The White House is getting a new garden.

Twenty-six elementary schoolchildren wielded shovels, rakes, pitchforks and wheelbarrows to help first lady Michelle Obama break ground today on a produce and herb garden on the White House grounds.

Among the crops to be planted in the coming weeks are spinach, broccoli, various lettuces, kale and collard greens, and assorted herbs. There will also be a beehive.

The first harvest is expected by late April.

Assistant chef Sam Kass says some of the produce will be cooked in the White House kitchen and some will be given to a local soup kitchen where Obama recently helped serve lunch.

Obama told the students that her family has talked about planting such a garden since they moved to the White House.

Such a White House garden has been a dream of noted California chef Alice Waters, considered a leader in the movement to encourage consumption of locally grown, organic food. She has been appealing for change through the taste buds since the 1960s.She organized a series of fundraising dinners in Washington before President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January that served foods purchased from local producers at an area farmer’s market to show how it can be done.

Reached Thursday at her Berkeley, Calif., restaurant, Chez Panisse, Waters said she was thrilled by the news.

“It just tells you that this country cares about people’s good health and about the care of the land,” she said. “To have this sort of ‘victory’ garden, this message goes out that everyone can grow a garden and have free food.”

Victory gardens were vegetable gardens planted during the world wars with encouragement from the government to make sure there was enough food for civilians and the troops. Waters says her family had such a garden.

Waters has been lobbying for a vegetable garden at the White House since 1992. Recent White Houses have grown some herbs and have practiced limited container gardening on the mansion’s roof to supply it with tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables.The new garden will be the first on the White House grounds in many decades, Waters said.

She said Michelle Obama always has been receptive to the idea.

“She talks about food in connection with children, and it’s a beautiful thing,” Waters said.

Waters also has pushed the administration to adopt her Edible Schoolyard project in which children plant their own produce to eat in the school cafeteria. Most public schools are serving too much processed food that is contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic, she argues.

-Associated Press writers Nancy Benac and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

First lady Michelle Obama, accompanied by students from Washington’s Bancroft Elementary School, broke ground today for the White House Kitchen Garden, on the South Lawn of the White House. Photo by The Associated Press