Tending our garden

With supper simmering on the stove, I went outside to chat with the Irish neighbors, recently returned from their sojourn on the Emerald Isle. Jetlagged, they were trying to catch up on tidying the garden, having missed out on the last month of pruning and mowing. Leaning on his rake, he recalls his Dublin neighbor, an old woman telling him not to sweat the weeds, since that’s what a garden is. He sighs as he relates how his US neighbor welcomed them home by dropping a strong hint that they needed to “do something” about the weeds. He says to me, whatever happened to neighbors gardening together, planting victory gardens, helping each other out? America used to be such a great country, says this normally jovial Irishman, what happened?

My mother has decided to stay in the house she and my father built, stairs or no stairs. She reminisces about her childhood dream house, built by her family right before World War II. It was a perfect white house with a picket fence in an upscale neighborhood, and one of its proudest features (tended by a man who made his money in the oil business, no less) was its victory garden. Even this affluent family was doing their part to help the war effort.

Americans in 1943 produced more than 24 million tons of vegetables for sale, including potatoes, in market gardens and on farms, and an estimated eight million tons of vegetables for family use, in home gardens.

(From the Victory Gardens Handbook, a wartime publication by the Pennsylvania State Council of Defense)

Think of it: home gardeners produced a third of the nation’s vegetables in 1943 (some estimates place it as high as 40%). Their success actually resulted in items being removed from rationing lists at the height of the war. What’s more, families were taught to can or dehydrate anything that couldn’t be eaten fresh (housewives, Home Ec teachers and university extensions were all enlisted), and any surpluses in excess of a family’s needs were canned for the greater good—the local hospital, school lunches, and food banks. Everyone embodied the adage of ‘waste not, want not.’ This combined effort released food for the military, increased the amount of vegetables consumed, improved the nutritional quality of the food on most people’s tables, reduced the stresses on the transportation network, and improved morale by empowering people to contribute. It also built community at a time of national crisis, as people from all walks worked together in community plots “in most cases in a very healthful, enjoyable way.”

Imagine if we could do something that could help reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil; if we could do something to improve the nutritional value and safety of the food on our tables, and in schools and hospitals and food banks; if we could get people to eat more vegetables; if we could do something to get people moving and outdoors; if we could do something to bridge the ever-increasing political chasm that threatens to paralyze our democracy.

Think of the victory garden the next time you are stuck in traffic behind a car with a yellow ribbon magnet proclaiming, “support our troops!” Think of what tending our victory garden together could mean.