Having decided on the plan for the garden, it still remained to take the large lawn outside the new (to us) ranch home we moved into mid-March. Unfortunately, this meant that it didn't make sense to start seeds indoors until we had completed our move to the new house, and unpacking took longer than anticipated (most of our walls remain bare and we have three boxes of books not yet on shelves as I write this). Therefore, we were unfortunately starting behind the eight ball.

Many World War II instructions had some variation on the following sentiment:

Although we live relatively close to Lancaster County, I doubted we could obtain a team of horses, mules, or anything besides historians' cats to come anywhere near our garden. And where were we going to locate a farmer with time to help us destroy our precious all-American lawn????

As it turns out, we hit a mother lode of friendly neighborhood farmers willing to help us with the labor of ripping up sod, plus an encouraging landlord urging his rototiller on us at no cost!
​
This tractor made quick work of tough sod I had half-heartedly tried attacking with a shovel before our neighbor intervened. Payment included cinnamon buns using America's Test Kitchen recipe. 

We wound up staking out a 20' by 20' square, although our plans called for 15' by 18.5'. We figured we could use the spare space for corn , and fudge-room. If growing anything more seemed too much work, sprawling vines like the squash family take up a lot of space and keep down weeds with their huge leaves. Besides, taking on as much as you think you could possibly handle--and then a little more!--is very much in the spirit of the World War II homefront.

The next weekend (this past one), I used a kindly-offered rototiller from our neighbors. This time, payment took the form of Smitten Kitchen's Carrot Cake with Cider and Olive Oil (subbing homemade applesauce from last fall for the cider). This was the final chance to churn up the soil and bust clods of grass once more before we planted this week. Meanwhile, the other half of my team pounded the fenceposts in and wrapped our precious patch in animal-proof mesh. 

One thing that is already driving home in this process is the reality of the amount of time committing to a full-fledged garden can take. As a graduate student, I often work well more than 40 hours a week, even if they aren't the most strenuous. On top of that, this spring I undertook to move to a new house, plan a wedding for early summer, and, as happens in life, was accosted by a number of family events outside my control that required time, energy, and emotion. Just figuring out how we are going to keep the regular lawn mowed is turning into quite the adventure , let alone raising a work-intensive garden in the middle of it. I'm increasingly inclined to follow in the steps of Mr. Aiken and follow his peculiar method of gardening described in one local newspaper from 1944:

This crunch on my time, energy, emotions, and sleep may be one of the most accurate parts of my World War II gardening experiment, however.

For starts, I'm hardly alone in undergoing a move as I start my garden; during World War II, mobility for Americans hit an all-time high. People cashed in their savings to follow loved ones to the military bases where they were assigned, to find jobs in new war plants (locations ranging from the unknown Willow Run, Michigan, to already-overcrowded LA.), or took advantage of high wages and low unemployment to move out of the racist South, like many African Americans. Unlike many of those migrant workers and families, I was able to find a single-family home to rent; many people rented rooms, lived in hastily-constructed apartment complexes, or even large trailer parks for workers and military personnel and their families. (Hence this "Share Your Home" Poster, courtesy the National Archives.)

Second, work hours were increasing over the course of the war as unemployment hit functional zero by mid 1941. My summer plans sound strenuous: working 40 hours a week at Hagley's Manuscript and Archives Division (on the Sarnoff Collection!), researching and writing my dissertation in evenings and weekends, and maintaining both this garden and this blog, all while hopefully still finding time for friends, family, and occasional barbecues. On the other hand, male war workers of the era put in an estimated average of 46.9 hours a week, many with commutes lengthened by relying on insufficient public transportation, walking, or biking in an age of rationed gas and tires. They were expected not only to grow gardens, but to volunteer for a variety of other patriotic drives each of which chipped away at time for leisure and relaxation. And at the end of those long days, they had no Netflix to console them. History's #1 lesson strikes again: no matter how much you might whine about today, the past was never really better.

Finally, my wedding plans -- although a tad more involved than your average courthouse war wedding -- are another surprisingly accurate feature of my summer experiment.  The marriage rate in the U.S. skyrocketed to almost triple the rates today, and 50% higher than in 1940, before the U.S. entered the war -- check out this great chart with awesome editorial from  The Washington Post. More about historicizing my own white wedding later, though.

All these time-sinks aside, as it stands I have now have a patch of land, and a plan:

One of the most common instructions given to Victory Gardeners is succinctly illustrated below:

​Yup, a man (with pipe) sitting at an architect's desk. God knows a woman couldn't handle that goniometer? protractor? calipers? whatever he's holding. (I hope my inability to correctly identify his tool is not proving midcentury sexism correct.)  Charging forward in the face of the first of many mistaken assumptions about my gender identity as a gardener, I agreed it would be prudent to make a plan. My first question? 

One fairly standard recommendation from the time ran, ​“There should be 1/10th of an acre for each member of the family on which 10 or more different kinds of vegetables are grown during the year.” An acre is 43,560 square feet. Ten percent of that would mean a garden of 66' by 66'. PER PERSON. The average population per household in 1940 was 3.67. That would mean a garden of 126' by 126' for the average American household; just under 16 thousand square feet. 
For reference, the garden I tended last year was a raised bed of 4 ft by 12 ft. It took a fair amount of time, and occasionally I fell behind on harvesting the never-ending green beans and tomatoes. So you can imagine my emotions when I started wading through World War II pamphlets with example garden plans and found the likes of THIS MONSTROUS ONE-BOYSCOUT GARDEN:

I knew that, ambitious and determined as I was this summer, this was not the garden for me. Mounding the earth around growing potato plants is a lot of continuous physical labor, and six rows of 26' ft each would mean 156 linear feet of earth-mounding this summer. Something in me also doubts I could eat anything near that much sweet corn. (Although anyone who knows me, knows I could probably take care of that much popcorn, and then some ....)  No, I would need a much humbler size garden to work with, one better in touch with the dietary preferences of this 21st century vegetarian academic.
Which brings me to my second question:

American diets have changed a lot since 1940. For starters, I suspect I eat a lot more kale than anyone in their right mind ate then, kale farmers excepted perhaps. There's a blog post coming in the future about levels of fresh produce and vegetable consumption rising and falling over the twentieth century, but for now, let's operate on the easy assumption that the vegetable landscape was pretty different. This became more and more apparent as I contemplated actually eating from these gardens, scrolling through the collection of sample Victory Garden designs I've accumulated.

Take, for example, the plan here. The scale is much more my size -- if anything, verging on too small and too unambitious! (Full disclosure: this 9' x 12' garden plan is meant for city growers with only that much land in their backyards; I do not have this space constraint, and thus would feel doubly guilty scaling down.) Size aside, if I were only planting a mere ten rows of vegetables, there is no way that three of those rows would include radishes (a total of 36'!!!) or that two of them would be devoted to turnips, much as I love a hearty root stew. So this plan was clearly out of the running. 

However, there was a third consideration at play...

The plan I chose had to be as close to typical as I could find, based on my extensive reading in World War II Victory Garden sources. Why bother with this experiment at all if I were going to plant and grow an outlier design that bore little relationship to anything else I saw and read from the period? A great example of this is the above plan from a House and Garden article on Victory Gardening in 1944. While I absolutely love the idea of following in the footsteps of working girls like me almost three-quarters of a century ago (yes, I consider graduate school work), I have seen nothing else like this plan: the thick border of mixed flowers and vegetables, the shockingly sensible placement of footpaths, the surprising prominence of endives. While it was a garden that two real Americans apparently grew in World War II, it doesn't appear to be the average garden -- or at least not the average garden recommended and depicted in media of the time. 

This is ultimately the garden plan I decided on (in consultation with my partner, I.E. the other half of my workforce). It comes from a great pamphlet aimed at beginners:  ABC of Victory Gardens. The fifteen foot length of the rows seemed ideal, and the variety of vegetables largely appealing. However, we did want to shrink it down just a little, so we eliminated duplicate rows of less-exciting vegetables to end up with our final plan. We cut:

• One row of beets (because how much borscht can two people eat?),
  
• One row of each type of bean (they produce so much!) 
  
• One row of carrots (in part because of my fear of failure with root plants - I can never see what they are doing!)
• And one row of peas (just for manageability, really)

Another consideration at play is that we are in a brand new home, with lots of work to do landscaping the beds around the house with a mixture of perennials and other miscellaneous vegetables excluded from mid-century war garden plans--about which more next time!
For now, back to nursing my starts and seedlings so they are ready to form rows out in the sun of my 15' x 18.5' planned patch of Victory....

      These starts are the beginning of several grand adventures -- and making their way to the great outdoor garden is only one of them. My name is Anastasia Day, and I write history for the meager amounts of money a grad student can earn. However, I also care about the present. My project for the summer combining the past and present is to grow my own Victory Garden --  using a sample plot plan, instructions, and recommended practices from historical sources as much as possible/practical/safe for human consumption.  This blog will document that process, as well as many other thought processes that occur to an historian in her garden from time to time.

Backup: What Is a Victory Garden?
In World War II, millions of American turned to their backyards to 'Garden for Victory,' growing food for domestic consumption in order to relieve civilian demands on the national food supply, to increase their health and wellness, to save on war materials like gasoline, rubber, and tin used in packing and transporting food to consumers, and to visibly demonstrate their patriotism.

In 1943, over 20 million Americans in their Victory Gardens produced 42% of the fresh produce United States citizens consumed that year. That makes Victory Gardens the most successful local food movement of the American 20th century.

Odds are, if your family was living in the United States during World War II, someone in your family was a Victory Gardener; even if they didn't have a backyard, community gardens sprung up in city parks, factories offered their employees pre-plowed plots on site, and rooftop gardens appeared even in downtown NYC. My dissertation goes into many more of the who-what-where-when-why-hows, but one of my central questions is: "What did these gardens mean?" I decided one way to answer that question, outside the archives, was to grow one myself. 

The Plan:

• To grow a garden that provides a significant portion of my (and my partner's) produce for the summer. 
• To follow World War II Victory Garden plot design, instructions, and advice to the letter where reasonable and in spirit where it is not. (I anticipate a post or five later in summer about the sheer quantity and dangerous quality of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides recommended in certain USDA Extension Service pamphlets.)
• To cultivate a practice of public writing; to wring the words out of me until the trickle becomes an unstoppable flood. In this way, I hope to stimulate broader historical thinking about our modern food systems and our relationship with the environment through food.

Coming in the near future: a post about the first step in any Victory Garden: planning my plot (AKA choosing from a variety of WW2 sample plot designs. The visuals are awesome.)