First Lady Michelle Obama is planting the first vegetable garden on the White House grounds since Eleanor Roosevelt grew a Victory Garden during World War II.
WWII
We talk today about Victory Gardens as a way of countering high food prices and an economy easily outdistancing meager pay increases. But during World War Two and before that, World War One, Victory Gardens were instrumental in easing the strain on food production and associated expenses when the the very future of the United States and the free world was at stake.
With war in Hitler’s Europe and in Asia jeopardizing even the United States, the Department of Agriculture began to urge Americans to plant Victory Gardens as early as 1941.
There were mutiple benefits. Fruit and vegetables would help win the war by making people more self-reliant, especially with canned goods rationed. It would also reduce the reliance on rationed gasoline for long-distance transportation by truck and rail, and ease the strain on labor shortages.
Victory Gardens also assured there was enough food to supply the Armed Forces and our allies, as well as the civilian economy. Not to be overlooked, the endeavor boosted the morale of civilians who felt, with justification, that they were contributing directly to the war effort.
Getting Crops in the Ground
Even as rationing began in the United States for not just canned goods, but items like sugar, butter, milk, cheese, eggs, coffee, and meat, average Americans responded by planting their Victory Gardens.
The Red Cross, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other organizations set up co-ops to coordinate the effort and to allocate seeds, fertilizer, and other food production necessities. Magazines published articles on Victory Gardens. The government disseminated a 20 minute documentary film on Victory Gardens which you can watch at http://www.archive.org/details/victory_garden. Gardening classes and leaflets and booklets were distributed widely. Work Progress Administration artists prepared colorful posters urging Americans to “Fight With Food.”
The Goal of Efficiency
Emphasis was placed on maximum yield and greatest nutrition value.
Besides lettuce, beets, tomatoes, carrot, and peas, victory gardeners popularized kohlrabi and Swiss chard as garden crops beacuse they turned out to be fairly easy to grow.
People increased their efforts at canning for the winter months with the sale of pressure cookers used in the process shooting up from 1942’s 66,000 to 1943’s 315,000.
Within two years of the early 1941 call, parttime farmers were tending more than 20,000,000 Victory Gardens in backyards, schoolyards, empty lots, parks, window boxes, and even on roof tops to produce 8,000,000 tons of food.
Victory Gardeners successfully harvested nine to ten million tons of fruit and vegetables, equal to what was produced commercially.
