The Historian in the Garden
  • Home
  • About
  • C.V.
  • Contact

Wha'd life be without homegrown tomatoes...?

9/21/2016

 
"Only two things money can't buy
That's true love and homegrown tomatoes !"
(Do watch the whole thing; it's 2:30 of pure joy and you will hum it while reading the rest of this post)

If I's to change this life that I lead, 
​                I'd be Johnny tomato seed...

​My partner is a tomato fiend—tomatoes of any form, in any dish, anytime is AOK with him. In contrast, I am only tomato-tolerant most of the year when our only options are cardboard red spheres raised in greenhouses or canned red gunk coming from our local chain grocery store. However, all that changes in the summer. The moment I get to grab a sun-warm, crimson globe of juicy sweet flavor off that vine, I’m hooked until the home-grown tomatoes are all gone. Further impetus to our household’s tomato-love was the recent acquisition of a pressure canner as a wedding gift (from my in-laws, who know us very well!). We were determined to have not just some tomatoes, but MANY, MANY tomatoes this summer, and to preserve them to bring some summery warmth to our winters.

Plant 'em in the spring; eat 'em in the summer,
All winter without 'em's a culinary bummer

We planned for a grand total of 25 tomato plants and wound up with 27. Per our garden plan, only 14 of those are in the Victory Garden. We have 9 more off the back porch, two that were in pots and later transplanted out, and accumulated two accidentals. This was a lot of tomatoes. We’ve canned over 100 lbs already and dehydrated probably close to 50 pounds more. We’ve eaten roasted tomato soup, gazpacho of all colors and sorts, mostly-tomato-tabouli, many variations on tomato pasta sauce,  burst-tomato galette, stuffed tomatoes (from Moosewood), salsa of so many varieties, fried green tomatoes, and just plain sliced and cubed tomatoes on top of most of our meals at this point.

I know what this country needs: 
Homegrown tomatoes in every yard you see!

PictureWW1 gardeners grew tomatoes too!
Just as they are in back-yard gardens today, tomato plants were the indisputable hallmark of Victory Gardening in World War II. Our pre-occupation with tomatoes is only in keeping with my historical experiment, in other words. Every single Victory Garden plan I have come across includes tomatoes, and every instructional guide lists the vegetable among recommended plants for even the most tiny backyard plot.  Even if you didn't have a patch of land or a plot, Americans still found ways to grow tomatoes. Victory gardener Elizabeth Guthrie remembered walking down New York City streets and seeing "every window box with a tomato plant in it." [25 Years of Community Gardening. (New York: American Community Gardening Association, 2005).] Tomato recipes exploded across the pages of wartime cookbooks to use up the harvest -- including entries in the 'Desserts' section such as "Tomato Spice Cake" !!! (I have tentative plans to bake this; rest assured, I'll update with results.)  Meanwhile, housewives across America canned more tomatoes than I'm sure I could ever fathom.
​
As a final illustration of the importance of tomatoes in war, please read one of my favorite historical finds EVER, straight from the Wall Street Journal at the height of the war:

'My one and only,' He cried passionately, 'come to me. Shake off the hackles that are holding you dormant, arise and let me take you in my arms. Let me display you in all your pristine glory to envious friends and passersby. Raise your head to the heavens and your face to mine, and by so doing make me the happiest, proudest, and most fortunate man in all the world. Arise, my love, arise.'
So saying, the amateur horticulturist hopefully sprinkled a little more water on the single tomato plant in his 'Victory' garden.
           -“PEPPER and Salt,” Wall Street Journal, July 27, 1942. 

I forget all about the sweatin' & diggin'
                       Everytime I go out and pick me a big one

But that's not quite true. I remember a lot of the sweating and digging. I remember the struggles. And, as a historian, I naturally feel it's important to document those struggles filled with sweat so we can improve upon this for next year! Therefore, a list of our problems:

Lack of Variety

PictureYay Southern Exposure Seed Exchange!
We only had three types of tomatoes, none very different from each other. We grew heirloom Brandywine (it only seemed patriotic, living as close to the Brandywine as we do), ‘Big Beef’ varietals that were gifted to us as starts by our amazing landlord, and then Fox cherry tomatoes. All three were slicers, all three were red, round, and of similar size except the cherry tomatoes. Turns out, you can get a little bit sick of home-grown tomatoes.
 
Solution:
Next year, I’m growing many different types of tomatoes for different purposes! Green Zebras and Purple Cherokees for color, flavor, and novelty, golden pear cherries for our small ones, and then only filling in the gaps with generic slicers like Brandywine and Big Beef.

Lack of Support

Picture
Not, not emotional support; the physical kind that should be easy and straightforward. We inherited some tomato cages this year. I had never used such contraptions before, but they appeared to be period-appropriate (can I get a source on this???), popular and low-effort to set up; plop it on and call it a season, right? No. Seeing the cages start to buckle early on, we supplemented with stakes inventively foraged from the woods and plunged into the ground by hand. These collapsed together with the cages as the tomatoes continued to grow past all reasonable expectation of mass and quantity. Our hopeful tomato forest turned into a sprawling tomato jungle. This is a problem because tomatoes on the ground rot more easily and catch more diseases, less air flow decreases pollination and also increases disease, it is incredibly hard to sort through the limbs to access and pick tomatoes without bending/breaking stems and finally, they swallowed up nearby rows of vegetables in their sprawl and were very space inefficient.

Solution:
Next year I want to stake out our tomatoes the way I was taught for big rows: we’re constructing a Florida weave, or else.
This is efficient in terms of labor since no tomatoes are handled individually, orderly in appearance, and incredibly sturdy, since it relies on metal stakes pounded into the ground. It also works only in rows; this is the most pro-row you will ever see me.

Bushiness

PictureJUNGLE.
​One of the traditional ways of keeping any plant from putting its primary efforts into growing branches and to make it direct its energy toward producing fruit is pruning. When done to tomato plants, this is called ‘suckering’ – nipping the new baby branches that start to grow between leaves and main stems along the plant. We started strong with suckering, but the timing of our wedding in the middle of June meant that when we returned it felt like all our efforts had been for naught. Despite early, conscientious suckering, the tomato plants had each grown too many limbs for us to keep track of, each too big for us to prune without creating a large wound and possibility for infection. This probably contributed to the tomato jungle collapse effect.
 
Solution:
Don’t get married at the start of the growing season next year – or leave town for a week-and-a-half for any other reasons either, I guess?  

I've been out to eat and that's for sure
            But it's nothin' a homegrown tomato won't cure

For all our troubles with tomatoes, both good problems (abundance) and worse problems (tomato jungle), we did have a success that, to me, stands out above and beyond the rest. Behold our great technological innovation: self-delivering tomatoes! Not only did we not go out to eat ANY tomato dishes this summer, but sometimes we didn't have to even go outside the porch!
Picture

When I die don't bury me
In a box in a cemetery
Out in the garden would be much better
I could be pushin' up homegrown tomatoes!

The Row Verdict

9/11/2016

 

Pre-Trial Context:

​"Make the rows straight. A good garden line is as necessary as any garden tool.”
-John A. Andrew, Kitchen Garden Guide (Philadelphia, Pa: Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, 1942), 
​As discussed in an earlier post, it became clear that I was going to have to garden in rows instead of beds or patches for a number of reasons. Most importantly, World War II garden plans are almost exclusively laid out in rows. Thus, it wouldn’t be representative for purposes of my experiment to pursue bed gardening. More minor considerations included the hypothetical possibility of renting machinery from a neighbor that would work best in rows for cultivation throughout the season (this, too, is a common piece of advice). 
Picture
The plan selected, for reference (sans all double rows except for beans and tomatoes).

The Case For Rows

Picture
I expected the upsides to row gardening to be clear; World War II materials claimed:
  • An orderly, tidy, leisurely, and all-American aesthetic. I'll let the quote to the right speak for itself. [Leonard Harman Robbins, “15,000,000 Victory Gardens,” New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1942.]

PictureRows from Putnam &Cosper
  • Easy weeding and maintenance, they said. Over and over again I read variations on the sentiment:  "Straight Rows Aid Cultivation" [Victor H Ries and Ohio Fuel Gas Company. Home Service Dept, Planning the Victory Garden. (Columbus, Ohio. Home Service Department, Ohio Fuel Gas Company, 1944) 5]. When your garden plants are in rows, by necessity your weeds will grow in between them, also in rows, and are therefore easier to identify, and eliminate, moving down the row either pulling my hand or using a cultivator tool. Furthermore, one should always pursue the fewest, longest rows to maximize gains here: "One long row instead of two short ones saves labor." [Joseph H. Boyd and Victor H Ries, Garden For Victory, Ohio, Bulletin 232 (Columbus, Ohio: Agricultural Extension Service, Ohio State University, 1943), 

  • Making the most of the space you’ve set aside for gardening: good row garden layouts help the gardener "plan to make every square foot of your available land account for itself in the greatest number of bone and tissue building elements," wrote J. G. Alexander (“Your Victory Vitamin Garden,” Hygeia, June 1943.) Close rows = more product per ft., according to all the World War II experts.

  • Rows lend themselves to more variety in a small garden than over-large patches of any given crop. You can even split rows half-way down, as we did with the radish/lettuce row. In the middle of explaining why one should follow their row plan, Sunset Magazine's Vegetable Garden Guide explains:  (1942, Full view)

Picture
PictureIbid.
However, I also had some early hypotheses informed by 21st century science and experience/intuition respectively:
  • Fewer pests because less concentrations of any one plant over a wide and long area. If monocultures breed pest specialization and increase populations, more plant diversity decreases pest propagation -- and, at least on the cross-ways axis, rows create much diversity. Essentially, if intercropping two species in a field is putting two rows of different plants side by side, a row garden with one row of each plant would be considered maximum intercropping if it were happening over acres and acres . . . so we should have minimum pest problems, right???

  • Ease of access for harvesting even small beans – no reaching across over-wide garden beds. (Even four feet can be way too wide if you are under 6 feet tall, as I have discovered in past garden plots.) With bed layouts, if you lean on the soil, you are inevitably compressing the roots or possibly squashing plants. Rows seemed initially like they could fix this problem; although there weren't any rows, there would be logical foot-places between the rows that would facilitate access, or thus ran my very early hopes. 

The Verdict on the Case

PictureHaving ripped out the overgrown beans, the tomatoes sprawl where beets and chard were meant to thrive...
​What actually happened: none of those things. Visual and horticultural chaos ensued. I never knew where was safe to put my foot so harvesting was an excruciating game of twister. The weeds lurked in all the hardest to reach places, and we still had colossal bug infestations! I’m convinced that the difficulty getting between the vegetable rows for harvesting and weeding reduced our total harvest as well, putting a dent in any gains in productivity made by putting so many vegetables so close together with no paths.
 
In all fairness, it might not be that rows are inherently flawed; it could simply be that the plan I chose to follow was bupkis in terms of spacing. Certain rows were COMPLETELY overshadowed by their neighbors. The beans in particular just took over all the adjacent areas to their own space and completely eliminated the path between them; you couldn’t tell they were in two rows within two weeks of sprouting! The chard didn't stand a chance -- the bugs that seemed to originate with the beans also migrated to eating chard as the season went on, so the diversity failed to save them!

[NOTA BENE Let it not be thought that I am denying any human error at play. Perhaps the beets might have stood a chance of surviving on their own if only we had chosen a more sturdy staking method than wire tomato cages. It became clear the cages were incapable of supporting the great bulk of weight presented by all the fruit, and the tomato plants swallowed the beets alive as they spread out horizontally as the summer went on . . . . The plan likely assumed we would be competent at staking our tomatoes so they could grow in a more, erm, vertical direction.]

Nonetheless, perhaps the unknown author of my garden plan should have followed Jean-Marie Putnam and Lloyd C. Cosper when they advised gardeners of 1942 to invest in some technology to aid with planting:

​"Garden-o-meters show the proper distance apart the rows should be for each type of plant." – pg 52, Gardens for Victory, First (New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1942).
[This is most certainly NOT what Putnam and Cosper were referring to, but this was the first google image result for "gardenometer" .... however, when unable to find any "garden-o-meters" online, my first thought was not dissimilar. I immediately went to an article I had just read on singularityhub.com entitled: "FarmBot Will Grow Your Food For You; Just Press Go"   . . . god, I really should write a post about farming-futurism sometime . . . ]
Picture
(Credit: Alice Thompson, click image for link.)

The Final Straw (no, not a mulching joke)

​The problems of succession-planting with rows was entirely unanticipated, although perfectly obvious in hindsight, and has permanently soured me on rows. Read more in the 'third shift' post coming soon!

Weekend Work: The Garden as a Sisyphean Task

9/4/2016

 

Garden Ideal vs. Garden Reality

PictureFront paper, Sunset’s Vegetable Garden Book. (San Francisco : 1943). HathiTrust Digital Library.

​Dating back to the earliest garden magazines, readers of horticultural lit have been treated to pictures of perfectly trimmed beds, immaculate borders, orderly plantings, tomatoes staked out upright ​and proud, with lines drawn by rulers and nary a leaf out of place. No one publishes pictures of that weedy back corner, the stretch of broccoli completely decimated by pests overnight, the potatoes that were vibrant one day and gone the next, the rows of spinach planted that never came up . . . (Did you know soil temperatures above 75 degrees Fahrenheit can stop certain varieties' germinations? We learned this just recently.)

​
My summer story is a little different than standard depictions of gardens from World War II - or any other era. Just Friday I came across the visuals at left and nearly despaired of my garden. I sighed and went to the internet for a quick break from work, when I stumbled upon a blog post: My Garden Sucks and That's Ok.  That's when I knew what I needed to write about this weekend. Still, one particular World War II quote came to mind as I surveyed the weedy wasteland at the start of some seriously heavy work and weeding:

For even though they have the best of intentions in the beginning, many people permit their own gardens to go to waste through carelessness, neglect, or ignorance.
​-Florence Kerr, “Community and Defense Gardens, Presented at the National Defense Gardening Conference in Washington, D.C.,” December 19, 1941. RG 16 Entry 17 Records of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, General Correspondence, 1906-1970. Box 303 (1941) file "Gardens". National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
Picture
My ego couldn't handle a further-out shot, but this is still pretty brutal. And this was after ripping out the horrendous mess of pest ridden over-old beans from the early summer.

My Weekend To-Do List Was Not Modest:

For the Victory Garden alone:
  • Rip out beans (old, eaten by bugs)
  • Replant turnips/parsnips row
  • Continue with setting mouse traps with peanut butter
  • Dump all the seed packets that got wet in the rain and see if any germinate
  • Pest treatment – make homemade spray? Investigate WW2 resources further
  • Decide if moving our little greenhouse to VG plot in winter, if so, where; rest that soil???
                       -NOTE TO SELF definitely call Mike McGrath on this and see if I can get on WHYY's You Bet Your Garden!

Outside the Victory Garden:
  • Rip out back bed weeds, fill in with seeds where zucchinis were, stake lone tomato there
  • Weed & replant sad failed lettuce bed: cabbage back row, middle row arugula, front trim of spinach
  • Start basil, chives in pot.
  • Try again with eucalyptus & thyme cuttings so have indoors this winter
  • Repot cacti, baby orchid, big orchid (need orchid soil though)
  • Make a raised bed and plant garlic STAT. (How much would be a years supply?)
 
PLANS TO EXPLORE FOR NEXT YEAR
  • Put a raised bed in lazarus bed where soil isn't draining well
  • Mulch the shed-stair-corner for winter so we can plant with flowers next year
  • Rain barrel possibility???

Results:

PictureSmartweed (Persicaria macula)- pest or bouquet?
This may not be completely surprising, but we didn't do everything on the to-do list. Tons of weeding was accomplished, some re-planting in the back, lettuce, and Victory Garden beds. Perhaps truly the most impressive outcome of the weekend was the nuclear-red color of my lower back after working outside for many consecutive hours on Saturday in a sports bra. It looks much better, though the sun is down now so pictures can't capture the improvement. 
As is the way of the garden, along the way to accomplishing the things we did, more to-dos emerged: the creation of the bouquet at left, the realization that I could be making smudge sticks out of the mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), ideas for pollinator-friendly plantings in under-utilized corners, and of course, more ideas for things to research and write about out in the garden. Here's to a week as productive and satisfying at work on the dissertation coming up!

Bonus: Delaware Gardening Resources (Try this at home!)

Because sometimes you still haven't found a Delaware-specific World War II gardening guide, and you want some recommendations that might take into account the warming in the last 70 years since World War II.....
http://www.thedch.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/Content%20-%20Planting%20Calendar.pdf
 
http://www.ufseeds.com/Delaware-Vegetable-Planting-Calendar.html
 
http://www.almanac.com/gardening/planting-dates/DE/Newark
 
http://extension.udel.edu/lawngarden/master-gardener-volunteer-educators/delaware-garden-calendar/

Following a long germination in the heat of summer

8/26/2016

 
... At long last a post has sprouted from the (questionably) fertile soil of my mind. Like carrot seeds that germinate for so long you're ready to give up and plant something else there. Speaking of which, twenty thousand other things have sprung from the soil – look at how the garden has grown!!!
Picture
Ok, so this was actually almost a month ago. More pics coming.
It's been a long summer and busy summer. Wedding, full-time employment at the amazingly beautiful Hagley library (more about that forthcoming), ​), vaguely trying to still be an active academic (conference proposals, etc.), and gardening around the house and in the garden adds up to quite a lot. As I pointed out in another post, it's not that extraordinarily different from the over-full lives of patriotic American victory gardeners and war workers. In one of the least surprising turn of events ever,  I am here to report -- it is not easy!

Fruits of My Labor

PictureBaby beans! (Now eaten/canned)
The next few weeks, I’ll be cranking out and finishing all the half-written observations, tentative conclusions, lessons learned for next year, trials, and tribulations that occupied the height of this heat-ridden summer (while you all waited with bated breath for updates, I’m sure). Topics on the agenda include:
  • My verdict on row gardening
  • Composting
  • Garden pests
  • Canning
  • Other forms of preserving
  • Food waste
  • Gardening economics
  • Lawns
  • Plus some book reviews and miscellaneous historical finds

But First: The Ground Covered

​Before I admit to all my shortcomings, failures, trials, and tribulations, I want everyone to have a clear idea of exactly the scale of my undertaking. Here’s a brief summary of all the ground I tried to cover this summer. Not just cover in fact, but plant, weed, water, treat for bugs and wilt, harvest, reseed as necessary, and keep free of rodents!
Picture"Plan 750"
All the Garden Beds Dimensions and Areas:
​
  • Fenced in area = 18’ by 22’6’’ or 405 sq ft
  • Lettuce bed = 6’6’’ by 2’8’’ or 17 and 1/3 sq ft
  • Back bed = 5’ by  26’ or 130 sq ft
  • Back-side/Lazarus bed = 10’ equilateral triangle or 43 and 1/3 sq ft
  • Front herb beds = two right triangles, 11’8’' by 12’6’', or 146 sq ft
  • Back porch pots = 13 to 25, avg. 8” diameter, thus 6.5 sq ft

​The grand estimated total is just over 748 square feet.

​For reference, this delightful home plan to the right is 750 square feet and includes two bedrooms, a bathroom, a family living room with fireplace and a normal-sized kitchen. Yeah, I've been gardening a house worth of square-foot-age. 

I did notice some beds got more attention that others – even days I didn’t have time or energy to water the Victory Garden with the hose for 25 minutes, I often found ten minutes at a time throughout the day or evening when I could water the entirety of the pots, the Lazarus bed, the Lettuce bed, the back bed, or take a few watering cans to the front herb beds. The same, unfortunately, followed for weeding, reseeding, and pest control. Just like how you clean the kitchen most days and the living room once a week while the bedroom constantly flirts with chaos, right? (I can't be the only one...)

A Little Knowledge Can Be Dangerous ...

PictureChard star!
I am more than willing to call this garden season a success in so many ways: more vegetables than we could eat, more herbs thriving in our clay-like soil near the house than I dared hope, we didn’t abandon the garden or give up because it was hard and hot, the weeds never fully won, and I did manage to get (something approximating) a tan from all the hours out in the yard!

However, over the course of the summer I realized that I am definitely a first-year Victory Gardener. I ran out over-eager and over-ambitious -- especially in thinking I could keep up with the blog through the height of harvesting! Both bugs and rodents ate way more of our crops than their fair share (like our entire beet crop!), bacteria wilt got the cucumbers, weeds were more wild than ideal, and we definitely wasted seed when our stock accidentally baked out in a severe heat wave for five days -- and then wasted time and energy planting the dead seeds! In short, I became the twenty-first century embodiment of the World War II-era Department of Agriculture's  greatest fears. The USDA encouraged scorn and mockery of those underprepared and under-committed to the task.

"We all recall the over-eager gardeners of the last war [...who] rushed into the field with hardly any preparation for their heroic labors, beyond looking up Agriculture in the dictionary to see what it meant"
Robbins, Leonard Harman. “15,000,000 Victory Gardens,” New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1942. Pg. 15.
PictureAn unfortunately apt, if hyperbolic, excerpt. Ogden Nash, “My Victory Garden,” House & Garden, November 1943.
​Most amazingly, I wasn’t even a new gardener! I’ve been paid to work in gardens and farms in three different states, and spent four years of undergraduate volunteering 20 hours a week or more on the school garden, plus spent a childhood watching my father garden (with varying degrees of success!). I surely had more experience and/or expertise than many of the urban citizens of the United States in World War II.

​The problem could be that, try as I might, I just couldn’t make myself strictly follow all the instructions from World War II. Some were impractical (plowing 100 pounds of various additives into the soil), some were dangerous (applying arsenates to my food crops), and some were just . . .  more work than I was interested in (ergh, I know how to stake a tomato just fine!). I wasn’t great at following the instructions, or being a good, pliable pupil/gardener. But isn’t that what most Americans/people would do? Combine intuition with past experience with inspiration and take these instructions a healthy grain of salt? My failures may well be as instructive as my successes, I suspect (and hope).

Unfinished Business

​However, these are only tentative conclusions. The summer may be drawing to a close, but not the heat here at the top of the Delmarva Peninsula, and as my World War II materials remind me, the fall garden season is only just about to begin!!!
Picture
Ralph Sargent Bailey, “Plan Your Victory Garden for Three-Shift Production,” House Beautiful, February 1944.

An Update--Hoeing the Rows

5/19/2016

 

[Update available here: The Row Verdict.]

Well, with much delay and ado, the garden is finally all planted. Over the course of planting, we discovered that somewhere along the way the 20' by 20' square we had tried to stake out had turned into an 18' by 22.5' subtle rhombus, but we were able to improvise.  Around the space carved out for the Victory Garden proper, we filled in with corn, potatoes, broccoli, and a few peppers -- all plants left out of the Victory Garden plan we chose, but that appear in others. 
Picture
Taken from the North side, looking Southward on the garden.
​Without exception, every Victory Garden pamphlet suggests straight rows -- often even emphasizing that they should run lengthwise, rather than across the short side -- so rows it was. The primary reason for running rows lengthwise is that when using animals or machinery, as in large-scale agricultural operations, longer rows means fewer turns at the end of every row.

A particularly fortuitous feature of our garden plot is that  running our rows lengthwise also meant running the  rows North-South. This maximizes sunlight for growing plants, who then have equal access to Southern sun exposure. [If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, the directions that receive the most sunlight to least sunlight, in order, are: South, West, East, North.] Accordingly, we also oriented our plan so that the tallest plants (tomatoes) are to the East of the other rows, to keep them from shading out smaller neighbors like spinach or radishes. 
"Plant the garden in long straight rows far enough apart to cultivate with a team and a field cultivator. [...] A garden like this will give the largest returns with the smallest amount of hand labor."
-L.A. Hawkins, Make the Garden Pay (International Harvester Company, 1946).
Picture
Confession: I've never actually planted a garden in rows before. Yes, all the seed packets give directions for how many inches apart in a row seeds should be, and how far apart the rows, but I had always gardened in rectangular beds and patches before, rather than in single rows. Thus far, I have several concerns. I'm trying my hardest to be open minded and there's a chance I will be swayed over the course of this growing season, but here they are:
  1. The rows situation has already made accessing all the vegetables to plant seeds very difficult, since the plans from 1942 do not include room for footpaths (which would be ridiculously space inefficient). As it stands, we've been treading pretty close to our plant seeds, and likely compacting the soil much more than ideal pretty close to their roots.
  2. When you plant only in a single row, you aren't planting as space-efficiently as you could be. {See picture to side.} This already profoundly bugs me, especially given the extreme rhetoric about the overarching importance of maximizing production.
  3. Weed control. When you plant in a bed style, the plants are close enough to provide a more or less complete canopy of leads above the soil. The labor of weeding comes down to almost zero once the plants start adding on leaves. With rows, there will always be expanses of space between the rows, just waiting for weeds to sprout up. This task has already begun, and is the largest time-suck in this period where all the rows are planted, but not all the plants need harvesting, suckering, or other tending yet.

Speaking of weed control ... the great unending task begins. Personally, I find weeding strangely satisfying and therapeutic. Next to actually eating the produce the garden, my favorite task is killing the myriad plants that pop up. And efficiency is my last concern. Standard garden advice is to simply use a hand cultivator (illustrated instructions here, courtesy midwestgardeningtips.com). However, I get really into the visceral pleasure of yanking plants by hand, individually and painstakingly. While using a hand-cultivator would take a mere fraction of the time, I almost always opt for hand-weeding ... and then spend an hour longer in the garden than I had planned on. (#worstvictorygardenerever.) Am I the only one who feels this way?

In closing, I just have to brag about the back bed off our porch. It's an additional project, where we'll be putting mostly sprawling squash vines. (I have yet to see such space-intensive plants recommended for World War II gardeners.) The bed was almost pure grass and weeds until my amazing partner put in many hours breaking it up while I was out of town last weekend.  I can't wait to post an 'after' picture at the end of the summer...

Picture

A Patch, a Plan, and the Matter of Time

4/25/2016

 
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:
[One] should make every attempt to arrange with farmers, landscape gardeners, or dealers of farm equipment for plowing large areas intended for gardens by means of tractors. Some gardeners will be able to secure a team for plowing as they have in the past, but the majority of backyard gardeners will have to decide between spading or being without a garden all together. (Hans Platenius, Victory Garden Handbook, A Guide for Victory Gardeners in New York and Neighboring States ... (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1943), 11)
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????
Picture
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.

Picture
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:

C. Aiken says the best way to plant a garden is to throw out some seed and let 'er go. He says and I quote: 'It's a mighty poor plant that can't out-grow a weed'. We think that he is plain lazy... ("Filter Plant News," The Echo, May 1944, 3.)
Picture
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:

Picture
The one thing I haven't bothered charting out is a time table for tasks to be completed -- why set myself up for disappointment? Being behind schedule will continue through the month of April as a family tragedy and necessary travel have prevented my partner and I from planting and transplanting, now that the last frost date is past. Wish our seeds speedy germination and growth when we return and scramble to get everything the ground.

Plotting and Planning

4/20/2016

 
One of the most common instructions given to Victory Gardeners is succinctly illustrated below:
Picture
DO plan your garden on paper before you start!
​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? 

SCALE

PictureDinky 48 sqft raised bed, late spring, 2015
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:

Picture
While humble compared to the 66'x66' ft per person recommendations, no Boy Scout I ...
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:

Vegetable Variety

Picture
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...

Representative-ness (for lack of a better term...)

Picture
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. 

THE (NEARLY) PERFECT SMALL GARDEN PLAN:

Picture
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....

Spring Starts

4/13/2016

 
PictureBaby broccoli and tomatoes -- and yes, they need to be thinned soon!
      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.



Picture
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.)

    Author

    Anastasia Day
    History-Phd-in-Progress. Writes about environment, food, people and how the past informs the present.   

    Tweets by @Anastasia_C_Day

    Archives

    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    September 2019
    July 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016

    Categories

    All
    Academia
    Archives
    Book Reviews
    Current Events
    Environmental History
    Everything Has A History
    Food Studies
    Pedagogy
    Victory Gardens

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly