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During the difficult days of World War II, victory gardens became popular symbols of frugal living and self-reliance. As the nation’s resources became focused on the war effort, families did their part to economize by growing their own vegetables, herbs, and fruit. The victory garden has enjoyed a new lease on life in our own day. In tough economic times, it is more appealing than ever to grow your own food. It can also be an important part of a modern healthy lifestyle. Even if you’re on a tight budget, these seven tips can help you get started with a successful victory garden. You’ll be on your way to delicious home-grown food before you know it!

1. Start Small

There are many helpful and inspiring books about growing your own vegetables. The Internet is also full of useful information on gardening. It’s easy to get too enthusiastic and take on a huge garden project in your very first year. Remember to start small! You can always expand your garden gradually as you become more familiar with the details of growing your own food. Even if you only produce a few rows of potatoes or a handful of tomato plants in the first growing season, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re a real gardener. You’ll also be saving money and enjoying better nutritional value every time you eat your own home-grown produce.

2. Make the Most of the Available Space

Are you an apartment dweller? Do you live in a condominium or a small townhouse in the city? You might not have a huge backyard to devote to your victory garden. There’s no need to worry. A victory garden can be grown in a very small space. Consider getting a small plot in a shared community garden or finding a rooftop garden you can participate in. If you’re in a tiny apartment, you can still grow edibles in window boxes or similar containers. Even if you only have a small strip of outside space, you can put food plants in among the existing trees and bushes. You can go online for inspiration in designing your small urban garden.

3. Think About What You Love to Eat

A victory garden may look beautiful and be a fulfilling hobby, but the main point of these gardens is food production! When you plan your garden, think about what sort of foods you like to cook and eat. Once you’ve started growing them, they will take center stage in your kitchen during the appropriate season each year. If you don’t enjoy eating squash, then think twice about planting a whole row of it. The same goes for zucchini, which is notoriously productive in late summer. If you do a lot of creative cooking, think about adding herbs and aromatics to your victory garden to spice up your recipes. The possibilities are almost endless. Take some time to review your favorite recipes and think about what foods you’d most like to grow.

4. Work With the Weather

When you grow local food, you need to pay attention to the local climate. Try looking up your town’s USDA hardiness zone and finding out which plants are likely to thrive in your victory garden. As a gardener, you’ll be working closely with the different seasons of the year and becoming more sensitive to small changes in weather. If you live in a colder climate, you might want to boost the growing season by starting plants indoors. With the proper lights and warming areas, you can create an early spring inside your own house or shed. By the time spring has sprung outside, you’ll have healthy young plants ready to take root in the ground, providing you and your family with delicious food.

5. Take Care of the Soil

If you just dig up a patch of soil in your backyard and put in a handful of seedlings, you may end up with some vegetables in a few months, but you’re not going to get the great results you want. Every bit of time and money you invest in preparing the soil will pay back many times during the harvest season. Visit your local garden store for a full selection of compost, mulch, and organic fertilizers. Make sure the ground is thoroughly tilled and aerated. If you’re short on time or muscle power, you can rent a mechanical tiller for a weekend and get your victory garden in great shape. Be sure to pay attention to weeds and remove them promptly from your vegetable beds. When the soil is in good condition, your fruits, vegetables, and herbs will be happier and more productive.

6. Think About the Long Run

Gardening can be an exercise in patience. In our modern age, when we’re accustomed to getting instant gratification with the click of a mouse or a few words on the phone, it can be hard to wait for months to see the results of our victory garden experiments. Sometimes there are difficulties with pests, sunlight, irrigation, or other variables of outdoor life. Yields can be disappointingly tiny or overwhelmingly large. (Have you ever tried to can a hundred pounds of tomatoes in a small kitchen on a sweltering summer afternoon? At moments like those, a garden that yields just a few puny tomatoes may seem appealing!) Don’t get discouraged, and remember that gardening success happens in the long run. Your first year as a victory gardener is just the prelude to a long and happy career of growing your own food.

 

7. Enjoy the Benefits

There are many benefits of growing your own vegetables at home. You’ll start to enjoy some of them almost immediately: plenty of fresh air and exercise, an increased sensitivity to the changing seasons, and the chance to think about where your food really comes from. As soon as the crops start coming in, you’ll save money on your grocery bills each week. The best reward of all — as experienced gardeners know — is the unforgettable taste of home-grown vegetables. Once you’ve tasted a tomato picked fresh off the vine, you’ll never want to go back to grocery store tomatoes. Start a victory garden this year and enjoy the delights of the freshest food you can get!

 

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During the difficult days of World War II, victory gardens became popular symbols of frugal living and self-reliance. As the nation’s resources became focused on the war effort, families did

As the U.S. government begins scaling back its Food Stamp Program, I wonder how 48 million recipients (almost 1 of every 6 Americans) are being advised to make the transition to reduced or discontinued benefits. Cuts loom ahead, too, for Social Security and other programs.

Is home gardening ever encouraged as a way to offset the escalating cost of, well, just about everything?

Some say it would be cruel to ask people to grow some of their own food as Americans did during the first two world wars. Literature from those eras, however, indicates people felt good about contributing, they saved money, enjoyed better health and had fun gardening with their families and communities.

We can certainly attest to all those rewards. Also, we are assured our food is organic. How did gardens (and clotheslines!) ever become symbols of poverty anyway? We consider them icons of abundance, fitness and good stewardship.

One of my favorite gardening guides is a World War II booklet put out by International Harvester Company that covers everything from cold frames to compost, pest control and root cellars.

“Get at the garden in time. Make a plan for it. Hang it on the wall. Talk about it … Make up your mind when you will plant the different things — then plant them,” the booklet advises.

Now, here’s the part I really like:

“Take care of it; it won’t take care of itself. Anything worth having is worth working for. What isn’t worth working for isn’t worth anything. A good garden will make the home more homelike.”

I found the 80-page booklet among some old cookbooks. It had obviously been referred to many times through the years, and even has a carefully mended front cover. Although the photos are tiny, Page 3 compares a bountiful garden in North Dakota to another where people have lived for years “and still no sign of growing anything to eat.”

“Grow Your Living,” the booklet warns. “It May Not Be Available for You to Buy.”

school-garden

Imagine a garden like this at your school.

When International Harvester composed the booklet, the food stamp program was new, initiated as a temporary benefit that was discontinued two years before the war ended.

EBT snafu

We hope last week’s Electronic Benefit Transfer system debacle in Louisiana does not reveal how people will behave if they fear their benefits might cease or food becomes scarce.

During a two-hour glitch that temporarily disabled EBT card limits in several states, Walmart shoppers in two Louisiana stores filled their carts to overflowing. Some customers reportedly pulled trains of 8 to 10 carts through the store or returned for more free groceries after bringing one load home, according to online reports.

When the system was restored, people abandoned their full carts in store aisles and checkout lines. One Springhill woman walked away from her $700 bill at the checkout as she had only 49 cents on her card.

Meanwhile, we wonder – what were people thinking? Did they fear the system was down for good and they needed to stockpile? (Hoarding food is never a sustainable solution.) Have people become utterly dependent on the system?

End of surpluses

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Stamp Program has been reworked a few times since it was created in May 1939. It was discontinued from 1943 to 1961 “since the conditions that brought the program into being—unmarketable food surpluses and widespread unemployment—no longer existed,” according to the USDA website. So, it is not unthinkable the program could disappear again.

Originally, recipients bought stamps that came in two colors: orange for any food product and blue for surplus. For every dollar of orange stamps bought, the buyer received 50 cents of blue stamps for free, which were exchanged for agricultural surplus items, such as milk, eggs or cheese.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy introduced a food stamp pilot program that no longer included surplus foods. The stamps still were purchased, although the cost was incrementally reduced. The USDA maintained that stamps should continue to be sold so as not to undermine the dignity of recipients. Three years later, Congress made the Food Stamp Program permanent.

 

seeds

seeds

The next major change came in 1977 when food stamps were no longer required to be purchased. The move to stop selling stamps disappointed many who had supported the program as a means to help the poor help themselves, not as a direct government handout.

Food Stamp budget cuts

Last month, the government announced a $4 billion food stamp budget cut that will affect everyone on the program now and for future applicants. It is estimated that at least 1 to 3 million will be cut each consecutive year for the next decade.

FoodStamp.org posted some reconstruction solutions, which includes removing illegal immigrants from the program. Currently, children born to illegal immigrants in the United States are entitled to benefits, as are their illegal alien parents. Is it any wonder we can no longer support this program?

Proposed agricultural solutions include farmers markets, donations and co-ops where recipients work for their food. FoodStamp.org says these solutions “seem barbaric to some progressives and others.”

A few quick online searches revealed little practical preparation ideas for recipients to wean themselves from the program. FoodStamp.org suggests that single, able-bodied participants find work or create a nutrition plan such as vegetarianism or a sustainable and self-reliant food lifestyle.

Another option is to combine vegetables with meat, grains, dairy, or other foods to make them last longer throughout the week. FoodStamp.org goes on to recommend ways to make vegetables more interesting, especially for children, by smothering them in dips and sauces. Or, coat celery sticks with peanut butter and decorate with raisins. Also, exchange recipes with Facebook friends.

Some of this seems silly to me, but is actually more advice than I found on the USDA’s site. To its credit, FoodStamp.org also included a short blog about gardening as a suggestion. The food stamp program now allows recipients to buy seeds. Finally — an idea for sustainability.

Teaching people to grow food

The USDA was not initially keen on promoting home gardening. When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt planted a vegetable garden on the White House grounds, USDA leaders worried her example would hurt industrial agriculture.

Eventually, however, the government endorsed household and community food plots and supplied gardening literature. The USDA also issued a 20-minute film to promote and train people how to plant victory gardens.

good-garden

Have a good garden.

The call to plant a Victory Garden was answered by nearly 20 million Americans during World War II.  Those backyard plots produced up to 40 percent of all that was consumed. When prosperity resumed, however, many gardens were abandoned.

Today, as food prices continue to climb and more people are unable to feed their households as before, it is time to relearn those skills. As they did in Cuba when their economy collapsed, we should be planting food anywhere we can – on rooftops, in window boxes, along the sidewalk, next to the garage – anywhere there is dirt. Even without soil, a couple big jars of sprouts growing on the kitchen counter are an excellent source of nutrition.

Modern gardening experts such as Marjory Wildcraft and John Jeavons say we don’t need to plow up the whole back 40 to feed our families. Marjory laughs how she made the mistake of tilling an entire acre for her first garden and ended up with an acre of weeds. Instead, she says now, start small – and keep growing.

Perhaps it is time to bring back Victory Gardens.

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As the U.S. government begins scaling back its Food Stamp Program, I wonder how 48 million recipients (almost 1 of every 6 Americans) are being advised to make the transition